


Same Heart

by Eloarei



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Child Neglect, Endgame Nick/Nora, Eventual Romance, Memory Loss, Parent-Child Relationship, Slow Build, The Institute - Freeform, Unethical Experimentation, Universe Alteration, altered timeline, real talk they don't even meet til halfway through the fic, seriously don't come for the Nick/Nora (yet), so come back in a couple months if that's what you're after
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-03-08 09:53:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 34,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18892243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eloarei/pseuds/Eloarei
Summary: Things are looking up for the Institute; just as the mercenary returns with the pristine pre-war child in hand, another of their best projects is recaptured: the Gen2 synth that calls himself Nick Valentine. But they'll find that it's not so easy to take the Commonwealth out of the synth, and that a longing for freedom is more contagious than they could have anticipated."Act 1" (chapters 1-7) complete."Act 2" (chapters 8-10) in progress.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started this fic like 3 years ago, almost exactly (according to my notes), and wrote most of the first 30k in 2017, but I don't want to let it rot any longer so I figured I'd start posting it even though I'm not finished. The first 'act' is pretty much done (though I'm still not sure if I'll post the three acts separately or together), and I've got an honest to goodness layout for once, so I'll see this fic through to the end-- eventually, at least. =D 
> 
> BTW, I actually sort of hate the Institute (so what inspired me to write 30k about the place?), so basically every detail is based off my hazy memory of the single time I went there in-game. Also, I started writing this before Far Harbor came out, so probably none of that lore will make an appearance.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance._   
>  _-Mark Twain_

So _this_ was the famous Institute: the machine that kept pumping out those robotic nightmares and giving him a bad name. It was white. Sterile. He guessed he should have figured from the boring, blank-canvas efficiency of the synths that kept coming out of the place; not to mention that it was called “The Institute”. Name like that could only make you think of padded white walls and thinly-veiled death.

No, from the little bit he'd seen of it, Nick didn't like the place at all. _Far_ too clean, and not in a good way. And that was saying nothing of its reputation, which preceded it and was equally unsettling.

“You guys _trying_ to make this place look like a nut house?” he asked his captors, one holding tight to each arm and a third behind him with a laser pistol just an inch from the brim of his hat. None of them responded, or even looked at him. “'Cuz it looks like the kinda place where you wake up and they tell you your whole life was just a dream and, 'by the way, take these pills'.”

The attendant at his left looked distinctly uneasy the more he kept talking, but still wouldn't look at him. “What is taking the boss so long?” she muttered. “I thought Valentine was a high priority. Can't they at least tell us where to stash him?”

Her co-worker on Nick's other side also seemed displeased; he was gritting his teeth and standing stiff as a board. “If no one gets back to us soon, let's put him in 102. I wanna hurry up and get my decontamination bath.” He glanced in Nick's direction, toward the sleeve of his ratty coat, and looked like he'd rather be literally anywhere else as long as it meant he didn't have to touch this Commonwealth-tainted trash. Then, with a shudder, he averted his eyes and cast around for something or someone else. He snapped the fingers of his free hand to get the attention of a passing synth. “You. Send for Director Lacroix. Tell her one of the seekers came back with Valentine, and we _need to know what to do with him, ASAP._ ”

The synth, like most of its kind that Nick had seen, didn't show much in the way of human emotion, but it still managed to look skittish. It said, “yes, sir” in its ugly robotic voice and ran off.

Now, Nick had never liked the humanoid robots for a variety of reasons: first and foremost, whenever they popped up, it always meant trouble and usually bloodshed. Secondly, their ill behavior really made it hard for a nice, well-meaning guy like Nick Valentine to introduce himself to anyone out in the Commonwealth without getting a few more holes put in him for the effort, just because they both happened to be mechanical in design. Third-- well, they really were just creepy, weren't they? Like looking into a fun-house mirror, except it makes you naked and expressionless instead of tall or fat.

Still, he couldn't help but feel a little bad for the them, if they all came from this place and had to put up with humans talking to them in _that_ kind of voice, like they weren't worth the bolts they were made outta.

Nick might have spent the next few minutes empathizing with them and thanking God that he'd escaped such a fate (until now, anyway), but that train of thought was interrupted by a commotion farther down the hall. He could hear people running, the excitement of a small crowd and... a baby crying. At first that stuck him as odd, but then he figured that the people living down here probably had kids just like anyone else, so, sure, these weren't the living quarters, but maybe someone was carting their kid around with them.

And that's what he thought until the noise drew closer and turned a corner, putting them in the same intersection of hallway and courtyard, and he saw that it wasn't one of the white-clad scientists who was holding the screaming child, but a dirty scuffed-up man, clearly a wastelander. He held the baby in the crook of his arm with some amount of practice but not as much care as you'd expect from a parent. Those who were gathered around him were looking at him and the child as if they were some sort of miracle, like the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus come to save them all.

“Is that _him_?” one of the scientists asked, softly and reverently, as if they were at some risk of waking the kid up from his tender sleep and not just providing further background noise to his concert of screeches.

“He really does look perfect,” said another.

“Looks like any baby I've ever seen,” Nick commented. He was almost surprised that none of the child's worshipers cast him any dirty looks, but they were standing at a distance of some yards, so perhaps they hadn't heard him. And for that matter, maybe he just couldn't see what was so obviously special about the kid, shackled as he was to his attendants. He looked harder, but the kid remained pretty average-looking in his eyes.

This went on for a few minutes, with scientists crowding around and cooing at the baby, and the wastelander looking bored and vaguely uncomfortable with the whole situation, before an important-looking woman finally appeared. She hurried up to him with her hands clasped before her.

“Is that the child? Kellogg, fantastic job! Let me see it.” Without waiting, she plucked the kid from the wastelander's arm (causing him to give her a disgruntled look) and held it up in front of her face. “Just look at you. Yes, if you're as pure as our data suggests, you could mean great things for us all. We'll have to get you tested right away. Victor, take him to lab 7. We'll need samples from him as soon as the tests come back.” She handed him over to one of the scientists, who nodded and walked off into the hall, carrying the baby (still crying; he hadn't stopped once) a little awkwardly, and then she returned her attention to the wastelander. “Kellogg, I'll debrief you in my office in a moment. I have one more matter to resolve first.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” Nick's left-hand attendant said in a heavy sigh. She shifted her grip on Nick's arm, clearly ready to be done. “I wasn't sure if we ought to get him cleaned up first or just put him in one of the holding cells, but I thought it might be a bad idea to let him get in contact with anything else before he was decontaminated.”

“Clever thinking,” the woman said as she closed the distance between them, her eyes scanning Nick with a mixture of intrigue and distaste. “Hmm. Take him to lab 4. I'll instruct the technicians to follow up. You've done enough for now.”

The two attendants nodded enthusiastically and murmured their thanks as they began to walk him away, but Nick turned his head (the third attendant had lowered their pistol and stood aside), and gave the woman a disapproving smirk. “Not a very cordial greeting,” he said. “You can be sure I won't be leaving a very good review.”

The woman didn't respond or even seem to appreciate his joke at all, and if Nick had been at all on the fence about his disdain for the Institute, that sealed the deal. Folks who were both rude _and_ humorless just weren't worth his time.

The journey to lab 4 wasn't especially memorable, since most of the halls and rooms they passed through were plain and white and looked basically identical to one another, but he thought he mostly managed to remember the path they took. Not that it would probably matter much, since he was fairly certain there was no way out of this place anyway; he was only hanging on to consciousness at the time, but he was almost sure that the synth who'd captured him had teleported them in, like some bad sci-fi movie, but worse. That was why he wasn't bothering to struggle against his captors. He knew when he was caught. He'd need time to figure a way out.

Still he wondered if maybe he should struggle a bit anyway, just for his image. Yes he'd been bested by a cheap mindless clone, but he didn't want people thinking he was just gonna roll over for them.

When they got to the safety of lab 4 and responsibility over him was transferred to the techs there, his two reluctant attendants let go of his arms like they were red-hot and excused themselves from the room, probably to go take a long leisurely bath in a tub full of Rad-Away. He debated playing up his radioactivity as they scurried away, but was too distracted by the _new_ hands on him, which belonged to the labcoated and long-rubber-gloved technicians. Without so much as a 'would you kindly', they manhandled him straight out of his clothes and straight into a shower he registered as far too hot for human skin.

“I should make a joke about buying me a drink first,” he said as they were throwing his clothes (including his hat!) into a waste bin. “But I feel like it'd be wasted on you guys, so I guess I won't bother.”

It was the worst shower of his robotic life, primarily because the company was so lifeless it felt like showering with mannequins, except instead of just standing there they got all invasive instead, and not even in a good way. What followed was only marginally better, if at all, because sure he was no longer wet and being scrubbed to within an inch of his life, but they left him naked and strapped him down into a chair that would have looked right at home in a pre-war dentist office.

“Is this really necessary?” he asked as they ratcheted his wrists down. (He _did_ struggle this time; he couldn't help it. An awful shiver was running down his spine and he didn't think it was because he was cold.) “I mean, it's not like I can escape. You _could_ let me sit down like a regular person so I can pretend I have a scrap of dignity left.”

The lead technician (distinguishable by the badge he wore, and the fact that he was standing around while all the others busied themselves securing Nick) finally, _finally_ answered him, the first time anyone had so much as looked at him like he was fully sentient since he'd got here. “This is as much for your sake as it is for ours. You're an important asset to our Institution, and it wouldn't do for you to harm yourself.”

His first thought was something he'd wondered many a time when he was out in the Commonwealth: _If I'm so important to you, why'd you throw me out?_ He wasn't especially bitter about having been tossed, since (as he'd just proved) out there was infinitely better than in here, even with all the hardships, but still he couldn't help but wonder.

That wasn't what he asked though. What he asked was the more immediate and visceral, “What the hell are you planning on doing to me?” and when the man wouldn't answer, “Come on, you bastards. You've already got me where you want me. You may as well give me the evil monologue!”

If it was at all possible, Nick would say that the technician both stiffened and deflated at once. “You may think we're evil,” he began with a sigh, “but we just want what's best for humanity, and you may prove key to that. But we have to fix the damage that has been done while you were out in the wasteland.”

“I like how I am,” Nick said, trying to sound self-assured but finding it was increasingly difficult when restrained and laid bare like this. “The damage gives me character. Or haven't you heard?; women love scars.”

The technician shook his head. “I'm afraid your _character_ won't be necessary anymore,” he said, though he didn't, in fact, sound the slightest bit 'afraid'.

And if Nick had thought he had chills before, well those were nothing compared to how those few matter-of-fact words made him feel-- like there was a cold hard hand clutching his metaphorical heart. The chills didn't last long, though. Without warning they were replaced by hot shivers when thick cables were plugged into his neck and the back of his head, the sickly anxious feeling of metal on metal and the electricity that coursed through it. And before he could even begin to wonder what they had planned for him, he felt the first warning jolt and knew that the end was near; he had only a moment left to himself.

For some reason, his last thought was that he hoped the little kid from the hallway wasn't going through this too. And then, to the best of his knowledge, he died.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I am human and let nothing human be alien to me._   
>  _-Terence_

So he wasn't dead. The incapacitating pain had only knocked him out for a while, it seemed. He was still laying right where he'd been before, strapped down and plugged in but feeling at least marginally less awkward. Seems he'd dried off, at least.

During his downtime, most of the techs had disappeared, leaving only two or three of them milling about the room, working on various other projects, probably. When one noticed that Nick was awake, they left the room in little more than a hurried amble and before too long came back with the boss technician.

“Welcome back,” the boss said, his demeanor rather more calm than it had been last time they'd spoken.

“Gee thanks,” Nick responded. “Wasn't all that great of a trip though.”

The boss shook his head. “Believe me, you wouldn't want to stay. We had to do quite the overhaul on you. You wouldn't have liked to be awake for it. Speaking of which, how do you like your new body?”

Nick's heart skipped a beat (again, metaphorically), and he looked down at what he could see of himself, fearing he wouldn't recognize it. Luckily it wasn't as bad as it certainly could have been; they'd either re-skinned him or patched him up pretty expertly, but he couldn't tell which. His skin wasn't quite the color he was used to (due to having the grime of years of wandering washed off), and he was more whole than hole now, which he hadn't been in ages, but overall he was still  _ similar _ -looking.

“Don't much care for it,” he answered, just to be difficult. He didn't have a problem with the body, just the method of having come by it.

It didn't seem that the boss cared much for his answer. “Well that's too bad,” he said, unamused. “I don't suppose you'll much care for the next part then, either.”

The next part, as Nick soon came to realize, was worse than when he'd thought they were killing him. It was literal torture. The technicians set up a recorder and then hooked him into even  _ more _ weird machines, and asked him questions about the Commonwealth-- who was the leader of Diamond City? What did he know about the Brotherhood of Steel? How well defended was the average settlement? He knew an interrogation when he was party to one, and he knew that these greedy bastards didn't need a bit of that information, even the pieces that seemed benign or common knowledge because each one probably factored into their dark plans. So he refused. And that was when they shocked him so badly he wished they'd just kill him instead.

_ 'If I die, will I even go to Heaven?' _ he wondered, in the clarity between shocks.  _ 'Old Nick's probably already there. Might not be room for two of us. Might not be room for robot men at all.' _

As much as he didn't want to give them answers, he eventually couldn't stop himself. They'd plugged right into his pain receptors and could play him like a damn fiddle, and he was at their mercy. He just hoped they overloaded his system or something before he gave away anything that would put the innocent people of the Commonwealth at risk. All Nick had ever wanted to do was help people who couldn't help themselves, and now all he could do was spit curses at the shady organization that had been threatening them all. It wasn't much, but he went at it with vigor until, apparently, the technicians had had enough and put him under again.

He hoped it would be permanent this time.

XxX

Nick Valentine opened his eyes, and had no idea where he was. A hospital? An asylum? The stark whiteness of the walls was not reassuring, the lack of windows even less so. He was in some sort of hospital bed-- no, it was chair, like the kind you find at a dentist's office, and he was strapped into it. Had someone been operating on him? Was this a quarantine room? Things had definitely been getting crazy over the past few years, with the building tension of the war and all the domestic anxiety that came with it, but he didn't remember anything about an epidemic.

The last thing he remembered was... it was all so foggy in his brain. It was there, but he couldn't quite grasp it. Something... something about Jenny.

No, she was gone. That was right, Jenny... she was murdered. It was... it had been hard for him to deal with, the grief and the guilt over getting her involved. He hadn't handled it well, so someone had recommended he visit some kind of... specialized psychologist, wasn't it?

So he'd gone. He'd sat down and let them wire him up. Some kind of new electroshock therapy they'd said; 'wouldn't hurt a bit'. He guessed it  _ hadn't _ hurt, because that was the last he remembered.

But  _ that _ place wasn't  _ this _ place.

“Hello?” he called out, his voice echoing off the emptiness. It sounded a little odd to him, but he figured it was just rusty with sleep. “Anyone around? I'm ready to head home now.”

After a few moments of holding his breath, he noticed the handle of the room's one door twist, and he watched in anticipation as a man in a labcoat joined him. “Good morning, Mr. Valentine,” he said, smiling faintly.

“Morning?” Nick asked. “I hope not. I've got work tomorrow.”

The man looked down at his watch. “Actually it's evening, not that it matters. It's morning for you. Dawn, I might say.”

Nick wasn't sure what the guy was being so awkwardly metaphorical about, but he humored him. “Er, yeah? Look, I appreciate what you folks have tried to do for me, but I've really gotta get outta here. The boss'll be expecting me bright and early tomorrow. You know how it is.”

Shaking his head, the man laughed, as if Nick had said something cute. “Don't worry, Mr. Valentine. Your obligations to the law enforcement have long been complete. Things have changed. You have a new purpose now, one far grander than your old life.”

The guy's entitled air was really getting to him now. “Alright, look, can you just let me out of here? I'm not interested in whatever pyramid scheme you're selling.”

“No, I'm sorry, you really don't have a choice in the matter. None of us do, after everything that's happened.”

For all that he just wanted to get away from this guy, something in his tone caught Nick's interest. “ _ What _ happened?” he asked cautiously, caught still between curiosity and wariness.

“Everything,” the man responded. “So much. The war, the bombs, the destruction of humanity. We may not have been around to witness it, but it's still affecting us. That's why we need you.”

Nick opened his mouth, but he wasn't sure how to react. What he did eventually say was, “Well that's the last psychologist I visit. Sounds to me like you guys need a dose of your own medicine.”

A puff of laughter escaped the labcoated man and he closed his eyes, a sad smile. “You don't believe me. Of course. I've read your file; you're a rational man. That's fine. So, take a look at yourself then.”

Consciously, Nick wanted to ask why, but his instinct caused him to take the suggestion and he glanced down at what little he could see of his own self. His heart rate spiked in surprise when he saw his hands at the ends of his long white sleeves. At least, he should have seen his hands, but these... these weren't his. He made a fist, and the hand followed suit, but he didn't recognize it. It wasn't his. Wrong shape, wrong color.  _ Nobody _ was that pale.

_ 'Some kind of trick,' _ he told himself. He calmed himself and looked back at the other man, sure to look unimpressed. “What's this? One of those new virtual reality things?”

“Just the regular sort of reality,” the man said, stepping forward. “If you promise not to do anything rash, I'll undo those ties and you can have a closer look.” He waited for Nick to nod (though he only did so hesitantly, uneasy with the thought of having the man come any closer to him than was strictly necessary).

Once his arms and legs were free, Nick stood and stretched as a matter of habit, though he was a little surprised to find he didn't feel like he needed to. He stepped back from the man, who was watching him with an almost amused expression, then, when he felt sure he wasn't going to jump him with a syringe or anything, finally gave himself a proper look.

First things first, they'd dressed him all in white. It seemed to be the theme of the place. He'd never much liked the color-- not on himself, at least. It wasn't practical for a detective; impossible to keep dirt and blood out of. A white shirt was standard, but you had to wash it all the time.

The next item of note, which he'd already noted but was now able to inspect in greater detail, was the terribly pale skin on his hands. A pallid, pale grey, almost the same color as his shirt. He brought his right hand up before his eyes. It was abnormal, not just in color, but something else too. He rubbed his hands together; the texture was too grippy, the flesh too firm. Virtual reality couldn't make his own body  _ feel _ different, could it?

He realized his hands were cold and tested them against his face, which felt almost dangerously hot, like he had a fever. It was hard to tell just from touch alone, but his face was similarly odd. His lips, his nose, his cheeks-- those were fine. Fine enough, anyway. But the overall contour of flesh and bones just didn't feel quite right. And his eyebrows and lashes were gone! And (his hands hurried upward when they found his face so barren) he was bald! There didn't seem to be a bit of hair anywhere on him; not even the fine rarely-noticed dusting on the backs of his hands remained.

Surgeons shaved patients before operating on them, right? Was that what had happened? Was it radiation? What would have caused his skin to solidify like it had? It was like he'd just gotten out of a freezing bath, except that his head was burning up.

“Intrigued?” the labcoat man asked, smirking at him from several paces away. He turned to a cabinet on the wall and took something out of it before he approached and offered the thing to Nick. It was a mirror, face-down. “Maybe you want to sit down for this.”

Nick didn't bother; he'd been witness to plenty of gruesome things in his time. He wasn't at risk of fainting of shock, he was fairly certain. Steeling his resolve, he took the mirror and turned it over as it sat low in his hand, and glanced down at his reflection, a safe distance away. He glimpsed his pale, grey-white jaw, no sign of stubble though he was sure it was after 5. His lips lacked any color, nothing to differentiate them from the rest of his face. There was no warm blush in his cheeks despite his relative heat, though his nose was about as right as he could expect, given the rest. His eyes--

“...What did you do to me? What the hell did you people do to me?!”

The man didn't respond.

He glanced around the room, feeling very caged suddenly, but there were no windows or doors other than the one the labcoat man was standing in front of. Nick was pretty sure he could get past the guy and through the door, but to what effect? Was it any better out there?

It was really gone, wasn't it? The bombs had really fallen? Why else would they have put him in this strange body? And how? No, but that didn't matter, not really. He was here now, so what was he going to do about it? He raised the mirror more fully to his face and looked again at his eyes.

Those weren't human eyes. Black as night, the part that should have been white. Funny, with everything else on him they'd bleached and they'd gone and made the only parts that were supposed to be properly pearly into dark chasms. (He looked at his teeth again; they weren't quite right, but they weren't black, at least.) And floating in those black voids, two rings of vibrant yellow, like nothing he'd ever seen. They glowed, a light visible even in the sterile fluorescence of this room. It was clear that they were mechanical.

But... he could see. These eyes, whatever they were, they did the job. And this rubber-plastic skin could feel, and his arms and legs moved much as he expected them to, so that was something, at least.

He'd  _ heard _ (although he'd thought surely it was a joke at the time) that the army was transplanting brains into robots, a horrifying prospect. It was... impressive, at the very least, though it made him wonder why. “What was wrong with my old body?” he asked.

The man, a scientist of some sort, most likely, responded nonchalantly, “Nothing, probably, except that it was mortal.” He hurried to continue when he saw that Nick was going to argue. “We didn't take you out of a working body though. It died, most likely from the bombs. We were lucky we could get this much of you.”

Nick frowned. “How did my brain survive a blast that killed the rest of my body? And for that matter, why don't I remember it? Nuclear war seems like a pretty memorable event.”

The scientist shook his head. “No, you don't understand. You're not a brain in a robot body. Your brain is probably as dead as the rest of you. What you are now is a robot with the memories of a man, and you're here to help humanity find a way to live again.”

He'd never been the sort to get dizzy when he got bad news, and he wasn't going to start now that he probably lacked the biology for it, but he sat down anyway. He looked at himself in the mirror again. “So you're saying I'm not even me anymore.”

“You're more you than anyone else,” the scientist offered with a hint of sympathy.

Sighing, Nick continued to stare at his strange unnatural eyes. “I'm startin' to regret going to that psych. That's what happened, huh? Wired me up, took a scan of my brain, and threw it into a cheap mechanical clone of me.”

The scientist shrugged. “To be fair, I have no way of knowing what they originally intended. And your body is in no way cheap. You represent the work of the Institute's greatest minds.”

“Yeah?” Nick asked, an automatic response. This was all a bit much to handle and he wasn't sure that he really cared about the minutiae. So he was a great experiment for this Institute, huh? Was that really any better than being some mass-produced military project? He was still just a brain scan in a robot. And, if this scientist was to be believed, the entire rest of the world was destroyed. So what was the point of it all?

“Look,” the scientist said, taking a step toward Nick. “I know this isn't the most ideal of circumstances. That's something we all have to deal with. But you can make a difference, if you work with us.”

Nick didn't bother to ask if he had a choice. If he understood the situation, and he was pretty sure he did, then he was at the mercy of this man and his colleagues, whoever they were and whatever they wanted with him. He hoped the whole situation wasn't as dire as the scientist was making it out to be. Obviously he and his company had survived, so maybe there was some hope.

And if there was any hope to help people, then robot or not, Nick was obligated to do what he could, regardless of how he felt about it.

“Alright,” Nick said, standing. “I guess we'd better get to work then.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.  
>  -Thurgood Marshall_

The Institute ended up being at least marginally less bleak and creepy than Nick was expecting, based on how Spartan the room he woke up in was. The scientist who woke him (whose name was Brian, as it turned out) led him out into another room, and then a hallway, and then the self-contained indoor courtyard it led into, each room considerably nicer than the one before it. There were even plants here and there, breaking up the monotonous white. It was sort of pretty, in a corporate way-- like a hospital, except without a window in sight.

“So how is it you guys managed to survive the war if everyone else died?” Nick asked, as he walked alongside Brian, noticing that there really were quite a few people about, and most of them healthy-looking, not like they'd been caught up in a nuclear explosion. He was formulating hypotheses in his brain (well, his head-space; maybe it was more of a hard-drive now, he wasn't sure), but he wanted to hear it straight-out.

“Preparation,” Brain said, a combination of proud and matter-of-fact. “Our forebears at the Commonwealth Institute of Technology knew that nuclear war was inevitable and began construction of an advanced underground sanctuary deep beneath the college. That's what you see now.”

He'd guessed they were underground, but hearing it was something else. “Clever,” he said, instead of asking half-jokingly if robots could be claustrophobic, because the idea of being surrounded by miles of earth was kind of unsettling.

“Indeed,” Brian replied. “If it weren't for their forethought, most of us would probably be dead by now, and humanity would certainly be doomed.”

Now that sounded a tad conceited to Nick, but he kindly didn't mention it, and Brian continued to lead him around the court.

The rest of the evening (if you could call it that, being underground and having no idea what the time was) was spent being introduced to some relevant people, most of whom were scientists of some sort, and shown around to relevant places, which were mostly laboratories. They spent fairly little time in the common areas, which Nick assumed was because he wouldn't be needing things like food or bathrooms much anymore.

He would have rather wandered on his own after the initial tour, but Brian seemed to have a plan, which apparently included an in-depth familiarization with Nick's new... co-workers? He wasn't sure what to think of the scientists as. Team members? Bosses? And when he saw the other robots, he was even less sure.

“Whoa, now, that one's not 'me' too, is it?” he asked as they came upon a white man-shaped machine in the hall.

“No, no,” Brian said, laughing. “The other synths were made from scratch. You're the only pre-war personality around here.”

Sure enough, when Nick took another look at it, he could see that the other robot, the synth, did have a slightly different facial shape, although they could have passed as twins from a distance. And when it stopped and greeted Brian as they walked by (something Nick later found they  _ all _ did), it had a distinctly robotic voice, unlike his own, which was about 90% accurate to how he remembered it and passably human-sounding.

But these other robots, these “synths” as everyone called them, how did they relate to him, socially? If the scientists were co-workers, then these machine-men couldn't be, because there was a clearly defined hierarchy between the humans and the synths; it was immediately obvious that nobody considered them on the same level. And if the social order was indeed so black and white, where did it leave him? The humans didn't treat him quite the same way they treated the synths, but they didn't treat him quite like an insider either.

He figured maybe it was because he was still so new around there, still holding a sort of 'guest' status that would wear off in time and reveal the true nature of their opinions towards him, either black or white.

_ 'Or, you'll always be gray,' _ said some anarchistic thought in the back of his head.  _ 'Because you don't belong here.' _

Regardless of his reservations over the people he was going to have to work with (not to mention the circumstances, which would take some time getting used to), the day was ultimately not a bad one, and left him feeling at least a little more settled than when he'd abruptly woken to find himself in practically another reality. He liked getting the facts; you couldn't solve a case real well without them, and sure maybe he wasn't technically a detective anymore, but the mystery of What The Hell Happened was still begging to be solved. It was in his nature to do so.

Aside from Brian, the other scientists all seemed fairly busy and promised they'd have more time to discuss things with Nick if he came back around tomorrow, so as soon as he was sure Nick knew how to return, Brian deigned to finally show him where he'd be staying.

“A bed, huh?” Nick asked, looking around the small, sparse room, which wasn't exactly what he'd call accommodating but still  _ at least _ had a window. “Is that something I'm gonna be needing? I didn't figure robots slept.”

“Doctor Hatten will explain more to you tomorrow,” Brian replied, “but yes, you'll want to sleep at least occasionally. We recommend that you keep a schedule similar to what you'd have had before.”

Nick supposed that made sense, so he bid Brian goodnight and laid down to give it a try. It was about as hard as it had ever been; too many things were going on in his mind. Maybe they weren't morbid murder details, but they were life-or-death in their own way, and equally as mystifying. He laid there for what felt like hours (assuming his internal clock was accurate; and, honestly, it ought to be), wondering what had become of the world as faint light streamed in through the window and left its reflection on the floor tiles.

Was everyone as dead as Brian had said? Was this really all that was left of humanity? Scientists who thought robotics was the way to save everyone, yet seemed to look down on their creations? He didn't think he'd been lied to about the war and the destruction it had rained down on the world; that rang true, somehow. But it felt like these Institute folks were hiding something, or issuing only half-truths, and not ones so kind as white lies.

By the time he fell asleep, Nick had written twenty theories in his head, each more outlandish than the last and none with any hard evidence behind them. Sleep washed most of them away, and left him with a renewed vigor for investigation when he woke.

Nobody apprehended him as he left his little room (without combing his hair or brushing his teeth or changing clothes; it was strange not to go through the motions of a morning routine), so he wandered out into the common area, as he'd wanted to do the previous day. The people seemed surprised but mostly pleased to see him, and several chatted with him almost as if he were a human, confirming his suspicions that he'd get along better with the workers than the scientists. He spent most of the morning getting to know the people Brian apparently hadn't decided were important enough to introduce him to before.

This was exactly the kind of situation Nick preferred-- when he could talk to the average people, unencumbered by the weight of their bosses looming over them. People tended to be much more open and friendly when they didn't think they were being watched or judged, and the ones that worked quietly on the side or behind the scenes-- gardeners, janitors, repairmen; those sorts-- often knew a lot more about the situation than you'd expect, and were more willing to share their knowledge than the more 'important' folk, who guarded their information jealously.

The first thing anybody wanted to talk about was  _ him _ , of course, or synths in general. Most of them had been living at the Institute their whole lives, and some families for generations because, apparently, two-hundred years had passed since the war. The first synths had been made over fifty years ago, so they were nothing special, in most peoples' opinions. But Nick was the first to be, well, like he was; the first with a pre-programmed personality, the first to be based off of a real person instead of a basic blank slate. The workers were fascinated by him. Unlike the scientists, who had been working on him for quite a while and knew what to expect, the others were excited to meet him and finally see what they'd been up to in those labs.

“You look different than before,” a young woman at the diner said, taking a break from wiping down tables.

“What, different from when I was human?” Nick asked. “Sure, I don't imagine any photos you might have seen would have had me quite this pale. Or bald.” He laughed at the mental image. Somehow it was miles worse than how he looked now.

The young woman looked surprised, scared for just the shortest of seconds before she laughed too. “No! I mean, um, before they were done working on you. I saw you once. You just look... more finished now.”

Nick gave a friendly smirk. “I hope so. Wouldn't do to be walkin' around with holes in me.”

She laughed at his half-joke, but it seemed that she had become a little anxious about his presence, so he excused himself and moved on.

After lunch, which he skipped (the man in charge of the food counter offered him a meal, but he declined, not feeling particularly hungry and doubting that he had the capacity to eat, despite the unlikely ability to sleep), Nick made his way back to the labs, to follow up with all the doctors and scientists who'd requested he return.

Doctor Hatten was his first stop, as suggested by Brian.

“I was told you could explain my new body to me a little better,” Nick said after they greeted each other. (An older woman, she had a more cheerful and distractable nature than the other scientists, by Nick's observation. She was friendlier; or at least she didn't look at him as if he were little more than an inconvenience.)

“Oh yes, certainly,” she replied, finishing up some notes and then tucking them away before turning her full attention on him. “It's really rather amazing. Quite a marvel of engineering; all of the synths are! Oh but I wasn't involved in the designing, so if you have questions about a specific aspect of your functionality, you might have to ask someone else. I specialize in the biological, after all.”

Nick frowned. “Huh. Brian said you'd be the one to explain my, uh, sleep processes.”

“That's right,” Hatten said with an encouraging smile, as if she hadn't just told him otherwise. “Your new design does call for periodic rest! It may not be  _ strictly _ necessary at this point, but we wanted you to continue living as a normal human would, to rule out any unnecessary outliers in our data gathering. At this point in time, your body isn't equipped properly to self-repair either your synthetic or organic parts, but it's best to keep in the habit of sleeping in preparation for that time. It'll keep you better in-sync with our control subject as well!”

She smiled, but Nick just found himself staring, trying to comprehend exactly what she'd just said. (He thought he might have got the gist of it, but as usual he really wanted confirmation on it, especially given how absurd what he thought he was hearing was.) “Mind runnin' that by me again?” he asked.

Doctor Hatten ducked her head bashfully. “Oh of course! I'm sorry. I only usually have other researchers to speak to about this kind of thing. I may be a doctor, but I don't deal with the clinic side of things, so I'm not used to speaking to patients. Let's see if I can simplify this... It's correct that you should continue to sleep, primarily because it will help keep your heart in proper working condition!”

“Heart?” Nick asked. “Like a... pacemaker of some sort?” When he'd first heard he was a robot and since coming to terms with it (well, he was still in the process of that, but, you know), he'd dismissed what he first thought of as a heartbeat as probably being just a trick of his imagination, a remembered sensation; a phantom feeling. But now that he thought about it, he guessed he'd need something heart-like to pump coolant around him, like... a car, especially given how much heat he'd already noticed he generated nearer to his core. If he thought about it now, he was pretty sure he could even feel it in there but, again, it might have just been a memory.

Hatten waved a hand. “No, you don't need anything like that! Not just yet! Your heart's only a few years old. If you take care of it, it should function well enough for quite some time yet! Given that the donor isn't prone to any sort of heart disease, at least.”

Now Nick was fairly sure he understood what she was saying, but if anything he'd yet heard had sounded far-fetched, this easily took the cake, and he wasn't sure if he wanted to believe it. “You're telling me I've got an actual human heart beatin' away in my body?! And you just plucked it from some 'donor'? Some little kid?”

“Goodness no!” Hatten cried, looking appropriately appalled by the idea. (Nick's heart-rate calmed back down a little, though even his awareness of it was keeping it elevated.) “I'd have never consented to  _ plucking _ a heart out of anyone, and certainly not a child. No, it's a  _ cloned _ heart you've got! Nobody had to come to any harm for us to get it. It was grown right here in the lab, from donor  _ tissue _ . The original heart and its owner are still quite healthy, I promise! They're our control group, in fact! ' _ Plucking  _ it', tsk. What a thought.”

Nick was unspeakably relieved, and also mildly ashamed of himself. He'd been entirely ready to believe that these people, this woman, had murdered children for their cause (and consequently for him). He wasn't sure how he felt about cloning, or anything else they'd done to him already for that matter, but at very least he wasn't working with a bunch of murderers, and he felt guilty that he'd been willing to believe that about them at a moment's suggestion.

The doctor had turned away to fiddle with some papers as she collected her thoughts. “Ah, but now would be a good time, wouldn't it?” she said to herself. She leaned across her desk and pushed an intercom button on the wall. “Can someone bring Shaun in, if he's not busy?”

“Yes, Doctor, I'll bring him right away,” said a robotic voice from the overhead speaker.

Hatten continued to shuffle papers for a minute while Nick stood around awkwardly and watched, wondering if she'd gotten distracted by some more important work (or perhaps he'd offended her by insinuating that she'd agree to murder) and he ought to leave. “Guess I'll just show myself out,” he said after a few silent moments.

She glanced at him over her shoulder, looking a little like she'd forgotten he was there. “Oh no, stay,” she said. “It'll just be a moment.”

And it was, only another minute or so before a blank-faced synth came into the lab, escorting the last person Nick expected to see brought in. It was a young child, maybe three years old? Four? Five? He couldn't tell; he'd never been great with kid ages. Regardless, it was a little kid, just over toddler age, dressed all in white like everyone else in the place and topped with a fluff of reddish hair. He looked well-behaved, which in Nick's opinion was just about the worst description you could give to a kid.

Abandoning her desk, Hatten came over to the doorway to greet the child, nodding the synth away in the process. “Hello, Shaun,” she said, looking down at him kindly, but still rather towering over the tiny thing. “How are you this afternoon?”

“I'm well, thank you,” he replied, softly but surprisingly clearly.

“Good, that's good. I'd like you to come and meet someone.” She led the way back towards her desk, where Nick was still standing, watching the exchange. “This is Mr. Valentine. We'll all be working together from now on. Introduce yourself to Mr. Valentine.”

“Hello, Mr. Valentine,” the kid said, with just the slightest difficulty over the long name. “My name is Shaun.”

Nick had an instinct to tip his hat in greeting, but he lacked the necessary article of clothing so he just nodded. “Nice to meet ya, Shaun. You can call me Nick if you want.”

Shaun didn't say anything more to that, but he nodded in response and looked over to Doctor Hatten, apparently awaiting further instructions.

“Shaun here is your heart donor,” Hatten told Nick, looking quite pleased. “And he'll be present when we do most of the testing. As I've said, he acts as our control group.”

“Huh.” Nick looked down at little Shaun. He was so tiny, and so young, but already he'd been through so much. He had to have been, to be a tissue donor, or at least Nick assumed so. And the heart that beat in Nick's chest owed its existence entirely to him. “Guess I have you to thank for my only physical link to humanity, huh?”

Although it didn't seem that Shaun completely understood what Nick meant by that, he looked up at him with wide blue eyes and said, “you're welcome.” It was endearing.

Since she had them both there together, Doctor Hatten asked if they'd be alright running through a few quick tests. Of course they both agreed, neither in any position (or with any real reason) to protest. She sat them down (in chairs moderately less complex and frightening than the one Nick had woken up in yesterday) and connected a series of wires to each of them, which ran to her computer. They sat for several quiet moments while Hatten monitored their hearts' rhythms and, to his credit, Shaun hardly fidgeted at all.

“Everything looks good,” she told them as she carefully removed the sensors. “Your heartbeats are as similar as expected, given the differences in size and age. You both seem quite healthy!”

“Thanks, Doc,” Nick said, although he didn't get the feeling that she (or any of the other scientists) was monitoring his health specifically for his own benefit. He knew he was a test subject, and that his well-being meant more to the Institute than just how he felt about it. In fact, he wondered if maybe his well-being wasn't all that important to them at all. His  _ health _ was, obviously, but if his overall ability to function efficiently (and comfortably) was what was really important to the Institute scientists, why on earth would they have bothered to give him a heart? Especially one that was going to require extensive testing. Was that really likely to be of any benefit to him at all? He asked Hatten as she was cleaning up the testing area.

“Well it's very experimental, of course,” she explained. “You  _ might _ be better off with the synthetic heart they first gave you, but there's no progress without change! And, to be perfectly honest, it's not just you that we're trying to help. It's humanity. Humanity's future.”

Nick laughed, a little confused by the idea. “Forgive me if I can't see how installing organs in a robot helps humans.”

“Oh it doesn't,” she admitted, chuckling. “Not yet. But in the future, we'll all be like that. That's the whole goal, isn't it?”

“You tell me,” Nick said, raising an eyebrow. (Or, a brow-ridge, he guessed. Was it still an eyebrow if it didn't have any hair?) “Really, I don't have a clue what this place is trying to do. All I've heard so far is 'help humanity'.”

Hatten continued to tidy up her work space, taking a moment to think of how to phrase what amounted to the Institute's mission statement. “Well. Yes. That's true. We do want to help humanity. Our goal is to create an ideal human, capable of surviving in the harsh environment created by the atom bombs. That was the idea behind starting with a synthetic base, a synth.”

“Right.” Nick nodded, following that thought fairly well. It was logical enough. “But why give 'em organic parts then?”

“Well they're not human otherwise,” Hatten replied, tilting her head a bit, as though it were obvious. And Nick supposed it was.

“Guess you're right,” he said. He didn't voice his opinion that stuffing a robot full of organs wouldn't suddenly make it a human. He didn't think Hatten or any of the other scientists would care for the opinion, for some reason.

Hatten went on with her explanation. “The eventual goal is to make a being with the ideal combination of organic and synthetic parts, which can withstand radiation but still experience life as a human. Of course we're not sure just yet which human organs will play nice with the synth ones, and which ones we can leave out altogether.”

There was really nothing for Nick to say to that. The idea was... sound enough, given what he knew of science and the scientific method. (Which was to say... not all that much. His brain (or what-have-you) was much more geared towards crime solving, and although both pursuits relied on logic and problem-solving, they really manifested in different ways. Which, honestly, was mostly a fancy excuse for why he didn't always understand eggheads. The real reason, he sometimes thought, was because they  _ liked _ to be a little difficult to understand.)

It seemed Hatten was done with him for the moment, as she'd gone back to sorting through some papers and comparing them with data on her computer. Nick was about to see himself out when he realized that Shaun was still sitting where they'd left him, looking quite a lot like he would rather  _ not _ be but also giving the impression that there was no way in hell he was going to express that desire.

“Hey, Doc, what are you gonna do with the kid?”

“Do with--?” Hatten looked over at Nick, then at the chair where Shaun still sat. She'd clearly forgotten about him. “Oh. That's right. I'll send for someone to take him back to his room.”

Nick waved her off. “Hey, don't bother. I can take him.”

He'd expected her to put up some sort of resistance but, to his surprise, Doctor Hatten just smiled and nodded. “Yes, alright. Thank you,” she said, and then she went back to her work, tapping away at her keyboard.

Shaun was at his side before he could even suggest that they go. He looked up at Nick as they left the room, and Nick could only guess what the kid was thinking, as he'd spent very little time around children. He thought at first that Shaun was curious about him being a synth, but quickly realized that was unlikely, since he'd been raised around them, presumably, and hadn't showed any special interest in the one that had brought him to the lab. But there wasn't that much else about him that was especially interesting, no other reason he could think of why Shaun might stare.

“You seen a lot of guys like me, haven't you?” he asked, as they meandered down the halls toward the living area.

“No,” Shaun answered simply, shaking his head.

“No?” Nick raised an eyebrow (ridge) in the kid's direction, which Shaun seemed to find surprising. “Don't you see robot men all the time? They're all over the place around here.”

Again Shaun shook his head. “I see lots of synths. But they're not the same as you. You sound different.” His expression still looked carefully blank, a little cautious, but Nick was sure there was the edge of a smile playing on his cheeks.

“Huh, is that right? Hope it's a good kind of different.”

Shaun nodded; the smile crept up into the corners of his mouth.

Nick was glad, flattered almost, that the kid had picked out his one really distinctive trait and claimed that it set him apart from the mass of robot men that were otherwise so like him. He felt relieved that one of his favorite personal attributes (and one of the few that had survived that Great War he still knew so little about) was enough for him to maintain his individuality, even in the eyes of a child, who surely thought all adults were the same and all synths doubly so.

“Well, I'll tell you what,” he said, deciding he may as well  _ use _ his words, if Shaun liked them so much. They were one of his greatest strengths, after all. “It's because I used to be a detective, back in the day. D'ya know what that means?” Shaun shook his head. Nick thought about how best to explain it. “Means I was a kind of police officer. It was my job to solve mysteries, so I had to talk to a lot of people. I got real good at it.”

By now, Shaun was staring unabashedly up at Nick, his lips parted slightly in anticipation. Although he didn't say anything, Nick recognized the expression: it was the look of a kid who wanted to hear more, who was desperate for someone to talk to him. He wondered if anybody in this place ever talked to Shaun when it wasn't strictly necessary.

“What do your parents do around here?” Nick asked. “Are they scientists like Doctor Hatten?” He imagined them being busy, tied up in work all the time.

“No, I don't have parents,” Shaun said, frowning at Nick like he didn't know why he would ask such a thing.

“Y'don't? So do ya live with your, what? Aunt and uncle? Grandparents? You gotta have a guardian of some sort, right?”

“I live by myself,” Shaun said, biting the inside of his lip and making a very carefully straight face.

That explained a lot, Nick thought. That was probably why they were using him and not some other kid for their testing. Beneficial to the future of humanity or not, most parents probably wouldn't agree to let their kid be a guinea pig like this. It was pretty sad, to think that Shaun was only in this position because there was nobody left to keep him out of it. He wondered what could have happened to his parents, especially in a place as safe and sterile as this. He thought about asking Shaun more, but didn't figure the kid would have an easy answer, and didn't want to distress him anyway. Hatten or someone could probably explain the situation better another time.

As much as he didn't want to downplay how Shaun might have felt about his status as an orphan, Nick had always found the best way to handle delicate emotional situations was to focus on the positive things. “No parents, huh?” he asked, careful not to sound either too sympathetic or callous. “Guess that means nobody's gonna be mad if you don't get home immediately, huh? If that's the case, you wanna go down to the diner? I'll tell you a few stories from my detective days.”

Shaun looked surprisingly excited by the idea. Or maybe it was that he was surprised about being excited. He looked around the hallway and then looked back at Nick, worried. “I'm not allowed to walk around by myself.”

“You won't be by yourself,” Nick said. “I'll go with you. And there'll be plenty of people at the diner. Besides, you've gotta eat dinner before bed if you wanna keep healthy. Nobody's gonna argue that.”

Nick wasn't sure if that was true, because scientists could be notoriously argumentative and there was no telling how regimented they meant for the kid's schedule to be, but at very least  _ Shaun _ certainly wasn't going to argue it. He smiled a big, shy, closed-mouth smile and grabbed Nick's hand, then tugged the rather surprised robot man off toward the diner.

He had a little trouble remembering any tales from his detective life that were really appropriate for a maybe-five-year-old, but Nick still spent the next few hours in a diner booth across from the very enthralled child, regaling him with half-true tales of the world above before the bombs. Shaun probably didn't understand most of what came out of Nick's mouth, but he still seemed entertained, contented beyond measure. The servers and other patrons (most of whom were the lower-class workers he'd met earlier) liked his stories too, and seemed just as surprised and pleased to see Shaun as they were to see  _ him _ . Apparently the upper management kept the kid either busy or safely stashed away most of the time, and the workers were glad to see they were finally letting him out for a while. Nick didn't bother to tell them that he hadn't exactly asked anyone; the diners' reaction was more than enough proof that Shaun  _ needed _ this.

They did eventually get back to their rooms, after the waitress had given them (meaning Shaun) way more junk food than was probably good for anyone, and Nick had exhausted most of his child-friendly stories. It turned out that Shaun was housed in a tiny room much like his own, only a few doors down, in what was effectively the experiment housing. Scientists, workers, and their families all lived in a different section, apparently. Nick had no reason to be upset about his own accommodations (he was just glad they didn't stuff him into a little glass case like they did with protectrons), but he was rather adamant that the kid ought to have a better living environment, especially when he found that his little room was surprisingly barren-- no toys or dolls, just a few books, and very little color.

But the kid seemed so pleased, as evening transitioned into night. He bounced slightly as he sat down on his bed. “Thank you for dinner, Mr. Nick,” he said, followed by another big closed-mouth smile.

“Not a problem, kid. You have a good night,” he said, backing into the hallway and letting the door close between them. He considered going to find Hatten, or maybe Brian, or tracking down whoever was really in charge of things around here and asking why the hell someone wasn't taking better care of this little kid that was apparently so important, but it was getting late and he didn't know if he'd be able to find them. Besides, he needed to rest too, if he was going to keep his heart healthy. Maybe he didn't have a strong attachment to it himself, but he didn't want to waste whatever Shaun had had to go through for him to get it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _An effective human being is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts._   
>  _-Ida P. Rolf_

Nick's original plan had been to get up and go find someone he could talk to about Shaun's less-than-ideal living situation (totally unfit for a little kid, who even _he_ knew needed more attention than plain white walls and empty synth servants), but before he managed to track anyone down, someone tracked _him_ down.

It was Brian, his first contact in the Institute. Instinctively, Nick didn't care much for the guy; he guessed it was probably because he'd been the first person he'd met when he woke up in this... place. (He'd almost wanted to call it a terrible place, but he knew that wasn't really fair. It was proving to be alright, all things considered.) But so far Brian had been relatively cordial, so when he asked if Nick would please help them with some research, he didn't have any good reason to say no.

(He brought up the plainness of Shaun's room as they walked, and suggested that he could at least get a couple of toys or something in there. Brian claimed he'd look into it later, and Nick wasn't entirely sure he believed him, but there wasn't much else he could do about it at that point.)

The techs seemed to be having a sleepy sort of morning when they arrived at the lab, puttering around and sipping from steaming mugs. It was encouraging to know that even a hundred years after the apocalypse, people still needed a cup of joe to kickstart the day. They perked up a little when Brian walked in with Nick in tow, though whether it was because of Brian's presence (due to his being their boss) or Nick's (due to his being their experiment), he didn't know.

Nick's heart-rate spiked a little when they guided him to sit down in a chair much like the one he'd woken in, nervous probably for the same reason he'd taken a dislike to Brian. The room, the chair, the scientist-- all were things he associated with this weird little nightmare. (And maybe life in the Institute was turning out not to be _so_ nightmarish, but waking up in a whole new reality where the world had ended wasn't exactly a _dream_.) He took a deep breath, aware that any calming effects it had were probably a placebo, and sat down as they asked. He managed not to flinch when they began to connect wires to him, but only just.

“So what's this for, exactly?” he asked, wanting to turn his head to look at the cables they were attaching to his neck but unable to do so because the thick cords were already holding him in place.

“Just some cognitive tests,” Brian said as he scribbled some notes on his clipboard. “A few quick scans of your memory core. Don't worry about it. You'll be unconscious the whole time.”

The idea of letting someone poke around in his head-space when he wasn't awake to do anything about it was pretty unappealing to Nick, but so far none of the other tests they'd done to him were all that painful or invasive, so he made himself ignore the apprehension he felt, mostly. “Aren't you s'posed to say it won't hurt a bit?” he joked.

Brian smirked. “Oh it won't hurt a bit. Just go with the pull when you feel it and it'll be like taking a nap. You'll wake up when we're done and be on your way.”

“Hm, if you say so.”

Although they didn't specifically tell him to, Nick went ahead and closed his eyes. (The image of him falling asleep with his eyes open was both a little funny and creepy.) He could hear someone tapping away at a keyboard, entering commands on a computer, and before long he felt what he thought Brian was referring to when he mentioned a 'pull'; it was a tiny little shock in the back of his consciousness, almost painful, like the prick of a needle, except instead of making him feel on edge it just made him feel dull, like a shot of local anesthetic for his brain. Some bit, a little soundless voice in the back of his head, wanted him to resist it, but he didn't see a reason to so he let it take him over and lull him into something that he would later describe as less like sleep and more like a temporary death.

A short time later, Nick Valentine re-awoke there in that room, but it wasn't quite the same man that had fallen asleep a few moments before. This man was furious, speechless with it. He yanked hard at the straps they'd attached to his arms and legs while he'd been out, irritated with himself for letting them put him in this position, but mostly angry that these people had tricked him so thoroughly.

The scientist known as Brian stood back a few feet with his arms behind his back, a model of detached professionalism. “Mr. Valentine. Have you missed us?”

“Oh yeah,” Nick growled. “My aim's been real bad.”

Brian rolled his eyes, annoyed. “Don't be like that. This isn't personal. We just need more information about your time in the Commonwealth. To better our research. Now if you'll just cooperate with us we can get you back to your new self. We'll all be much better off that way, I promise you.”

“Excuse me if I'm not especially inclined to listen to your promises.”

It didn't seem, however, that Brian was especially inclined to listen to (or pay any attention to) Nick's response or any of the other quips he tossed at them. They got right along with the interrogation, and it went pretty much the same way it did the time before, except that this time when Nick stopped to ask them questions in between the bouts of excruciating pain it was because he now had enough inside info to be genuinely curious about certain topics instead of just stalling in the hopes they would get bored with wringing secrets from him.

“Why the shock treatment?” he asked, still reeling from the last round. If he hadn't stopped bothering to breathe some years ago, he'd have been gasping for breath. As it was, he was just shaking. “Obviously you guys can take my memories out. Why not just stick them in a computer or something?”

“It doesn't work like that,” a young technician woman told him from a computer in the back of the room. (Brian had stepped out; there were apparently more important things to do than torture Nick Valentine.) She paused in her furious typing and looked up at him, a little more excited than he would have expected. (But then he remembered who he was dealing with and figured he _should_ expect that kind of fanaticism.) “Your memory core is a really genius design, engineered so that nobody else could steal Institute secrets. Although we can store them on a console, they're unintelligible without your very specific personal signature to use as a decoder. Therefore, you're the only one who can access your memories.”

That was news to Nick, but he guessed it made sense. Even the Institute wasn't sadistic enough to torture people if it wasn't necessary (probably). But he still wasn't sure why they bothered doing it to _him_. Why not just install a copy of his personality (which he assumed included that signature the girl was talking about) onto another synth, or a robot? Maybe even one without arms, so they didn't have to bother strapping him down-- just a mouth to answer their questions. Seemed like the sort of utilitarian thing they'd do. He asked the girl.

She shook her head, now multi-tasking answering him and typing. “That would be really convenient, but you've got the only copy and it's non-transferable. I'm told there used to be backups, but the data was all destroyed for some reason.”

Nick scoffed. “Guess I'm just lucky then. But, hey, if I'm the only one then maybe you oughta be more gentle with me. This can't be good for the ol' ticker.”

The tech girl laughed for a short second, taking his comment as a joke, but then stopped abruptly as (Nick assumed) she remembered that he wasn't strictly mechanical anymore. “Huh...” she said, chewing on her bottom lip. She turned to one of her coworkers and gave them a nervous grimace. “Do you think that's really an issue?”

The idea that they might be irreparably damaging their only subject put the lower-level technicians on edge, so they ended the session earlier than they planned. When they ran the program to return Nick to his other consciousness, he let it overtake him without struggling, a little bit smugly proud of messing their plans up.

He woke in a fairly foul mood, an unpleasant tingling lingering in his spine. “Well _that_ was the worst nap I've ever had.” He looked around for Brian, but he was nowhere in sight. “Tell your boss I think he needs to fine-tune whatever it is you folks were getting up to just now, because I wouldn't say that 'didn't hurt a bit'.”

The techs all looked at him like they were afraid he was going to snap at them; one rushed forward to offer him a hand out of the examination chair (which he declined; he wasn't an invalid, just uncomfortable), apologizing profusely while the others busied themselves trying to pretend they weren't watching him out of the corners of their eyes.

Out in the hall, Nick stretched, hoping or wishing he could work the tenseness out of his synthetic muscles, though he wasn't sure they worked that way. Figuring the feeling would fade in time, he decided to ignore it and renew his search for whoever was in charge of the living situation. To that end he headed to the administration quarter (Brian had only vaguely motioned to it on their tour, but Nick had thought it worth remembering), in hopes that he could find an administrator of some kind.

But again he was waylaid, this time by a messenger synth who bid him come to Hatten's office for a check-up. He arrived in the middle of an argument.

“This was _my_ project! My team had precedence!” Brian was red in the face, shouting at the doctor, who seemed very unimpressed with him.

“I'm sorry,” she said, in no way sounding apologetic. “Director Lacroix said she wants us to focus on the organ implementation, and that means we need to keep all of our subjects in good working order or the results will be skewed.”

Brian scoffed. “There's no point in making organic synths if we don't know what we're sending them out into. We need that information!”

“It really isn't my decision,” Hatten said with a light shrug. “Besides, I don't see why you can't just send the seekers out to get your data. It's worked so far.”

“It's not the same,” the technician told her, growling in annoyance. “It's--” He looked over to Nick, who had turned the corner a moment ago but was hanging back near the doorway to give them space. “It's just not the same.”

Hatten shook her head. “Well you'll have to bring it up with the Director. For now, I'm too busy to argue. Mr. Valentine needs a check-up. He won't be much good to anyone if he dies of heart failure now will he?”

Brian made a dismissive, angry noise and left the room in a huff, throwing Nick an unnecessarily dirty look as he went, leaving the synth to wonder what he'd walked in on and if it had anything to do with him.

“Oh don't worry about him,” Hatten said, waving a hand. “Experiments don't always go the way we want them to, and he's not handling it well. But he'll get over it when he realizes it's not all about him. Now let's get you looked at!”

They ran through a series of tests once Nick had been hooked up to the wires, at first very gentle and then more strenuous when Hatten was quite sure Nick's heart was healthy enough to handle it. Still it was nothing all that difficult, just alternating between different light exercises and a quick jog on a treadmill. He found that the action of motion put him in a better mood than he'd been in any of the previous few days, if not because his body could actually give him endorphins anymore then because running couldn't help but remind him of being on a case, tailing some shady figure down a dark, cluttered alleyway. If he closed his eyes, he could almost _almost_ convince himself he was back in that life, for just the shortest of seconds.

“You don't need the kid around for this set?” he wondered aloud, halfway through a minute-long jog. (He couldn't decide yet if he missed the very human shortness of breath that came with having lungs, but it was convenient not to have to stop or slow down to talk to someone, at least.)

“We'll run another test with him next week,” Hatten told him. “But I only need to compare you to the baseline I got for you yesterday. Besides, I already had him in here earlier, testing against one of the other synths for the digestive system. We had some difficulties because Shaun's stomach kept acting up, so I sent him back to his room to rest. He'll be down for the rest of the day, I imagine.”

“Is he alright?” Nick asked.

A soft snort escaped Hatten. “From a human standpoint, he's fine. Just a small stomach ache, nothing that won't pass with time. Scientifically, though, it doesn't make for a very good control group. I'll have to see if there was a change in his diet.”

A timer beeped on the doctor's desk, and the treadmill slowed to a stop. Nick stepped off carefully (lifting the wires over the handrail) and approached Hatten's desk, estimating she'd be about done by now and could remove them for him. “I might've had a hand in that,” he admitted, thinking of how many cakes and puddings the kid had eaten the night before. “We stopped by the diner and the people there were so surprised to see him they just kept piling snacks on his plate. I wouldn't normally let a kid eat that much junk food, but he looked like he was having the time of his life, so I really couldn't bring myself to stop him.”

“Ah, that makes sense,” Hatten said, smiling as the pieces fell into place, and Nick was glad to see she didn't seem upset. “If we're adding a wider variety of food to his diet, we'll need to be sure to keep track of the new things he eats; the other synth will have to consume the same kinds of foods in roughly the same quantities, in order for our data sets to be accurate. Do please make note of any further deviations from Shaun's scheduled diet. In fact, if you let us know beforehand we can plan more appropriately.”

“So you're not mad?” Nick asked. He'd really figured he was going to have to use all his charm (whatever remained of it, these days) to justify breaking Shaun out of his schedule.

“Oh there's no point in it. Any good scientist ought to be able to adjust to new data.” She glanced up from her monitor and smiled shortly at Nick before going back to her work. “I have what I need from you for now. You may go.”

Nick hadn't gotten the first sensor off of his chest before Hatten had realized what he was doing and was at his side, batting his hands away. “Yes, yes, let's get these off of you. Here now, I'll do it.” (Nick just stood there and waited patiently the minute and a half it took her to be done. Her distractable nature was perhaps a little exasperating, but he found it was, by far, not the worst problem he could anticipate having.)

Once he had his shirt back on (and still he hadn't gotten used to wearing all white, but it was what he had), Nick made to leave the lab but pivoted in the doorway, figuring Hatten was as good as anyone he could ask for this next favor.

“Say, I don't know if you've seen the kid's room, but it's pretty bare. You wouldn't happen to have anything to liven it up a little, would ya? Toys, kids' books?”

Hatten shook her head, looking thoughtful. “Not on hand, no,” she said. “But I'll ask around, if you like.”

He still didn't get the feeling that any of the scientists really saw Nick's request as having any sort of importance, even kindly old Hatten, but with time and persistence they did begin to respond to him about them. The next time he came in for testing, Hatten gave Nick a bag of toys and books she'd rounded up from somewhere or another; the gesture felt like an afterthought, but in this case in was the result that counted, and Nick was grateful for them. Shaun was grateful too, when Nick walked him back to his room after their session and gave him the hand-me-down items.

Although 'grateful' probably wasn't the right word; he did say “thank you, Mr. Nick!”, far more polite than the average five year old, to Nick's knowledge, but it was more of a reflex that he had to get out before he could tear into the colorful new items with glee. So although Nick was sure that Shaun _was_ grateful, it was obvious that more than anything he was ecstatic. The thanks was nice, but seeing the kid happy was what really made it worth it.

And over the course of the next few months and the years that followed, Nick found that it was easily his biggest joy. The clean, clinical Institute was so obsessed with synths that they didn't realize they couldn't raise a boy the same way they raised a robot, even if, over time, the creations came closer and closer to being human. The synths still lacked a certain spark, the thing that made a human a human, the thing that sometimes Nick thought he was the only one to notice in Shaun. So, he took it upon himself to nurture it, and every time he did, every time he gave Shaun a new toy or book, or told him a new story about the great huge world he'd never seen, he was rewarded with a look of wonder so pure he had no idea how the scientists missed it-- that _this_ was what made Shaun special, not the purity of his DNA.

The passing of time hadn't ingratiated Nick to the scientists or they to him, as he'd initially thought it might. He still didn't care much for their plans and their tests and their experiments; the awkward distrust he seemed to harbor for them grew by the month. But as long as he could get them to treat the kid with the respect he deserved, he figured he could put up with their prodding. After all, it wasn't as if there was anywhere else for him to go. Maybe he didn't quite believe them about their plans to save humanity through biological engineering, but the Institute still held the future of humanity in their grasp, and Nick figured it was the best he could do to make sure the boy was treated right.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world --that is the myth of the atomic age-- as in being able to remake ourselves._   
>  _-Mahatma Gandhi_

It took him a month of Sundays, but he finally got Shaun to stop calling him _Mister_ Nick. It wasn't that he was especially bothered by being called that. It was actually pretty cute, but he'd never much liked being called Mister. 'Mr. Valentine' was fine in professional settings, but only if he didn't know the person very well. Everyone he'd worked with back on the force had called him either Valentine or Nick. One sarcastic out-of-state superior had called him Nicholas, but his usual coworkers didn't dare. _Mr._ Nick made it sound exactly like it was: that he was an adult man trying to be a good influence on a cute little kid he'd stumbled across. But it still felt too impersonal for a situation like theirs, because he wasn't really a well-to-do mentor looking after a disenfranchised orphan any more than they were both guinea pigs trying to make the best of being trapped in a cage. The biggest difference was that Nick knew that there was a life outside their cage, whereas for Shaun it was all there was.

That couldn't last long. Even if it weren't for Nick encouraging him, Shaun would have started asking questions sooner or later. He was getting older, more aware of the world (even if, in his case, that world was very small). He started wanting to know how things worked, and why. Nick did his best to answer the kid's questions about their little self-contained community at the Institute, and when he didn't know or couldn't explain in enough detail, he asked the workers or the scientists, who were all plenty happy to go into different levels of detail, depending on what their own particular forte was.

When Shaun had a pretty good grasp on how their home worked, he plied Nick with questions about the world before the bombs, like he'd seen in his books and heard from Nick's stories. This, of course, was something that Nick was singularly skilled at, over anyone else in the place, as the only one who'd ever actually seen that world. Shaun loved the mental pictures he painted with his words, and painted a few physical pictures in return, which Nick hung on his own bedroom walls, glad to have some color on them.

But it was inevitable that eventually that wouldn't be enough. The world of Nick's past sounded so beautiful and so exciting (due largely to Nick's nostalgic story-telling, probably, but also because, well, it _was_ beautiful and exciting), Shaun couldn't help but want to go there. And he was a smart kid, so he knew without having to be told twice that that was impossible. Nick's world was gone. But the next best thing, of course, _obviously_ , the next best thing was to see whatever _was_ up there.

Nick was there the first (and only) time Shaun got the idea in his head to ask if he could go above-ground.

“ _Heavens_ no,” Hatten had said, laughing at the ridiculous idea. Nick was glad it had been her that Shaun had let the idea slip to, and not someone like Director Lacroix (who he'd only met a handful of times, but never felt especially... encouraged by). Hatten just shook her head in a grandmotherly way and continued to jot down her data. “It's a mess up there, Shaun. Very, very unpleasant.”

“Really?” he asked, staring up at her with his wide blue eyes and biting his lip in worry. “How?”

But Hatten wouldn't speak of it. “I'm sorry, Shaun,” she said. “It isn't something we can talk about.”

Naturally Shaun assumed that only meant _Hatten_ wasn't willing to discuss it, so he tried one of the other adults later, a cook at the diner.

“Can you tell me about the above-ground?” the kid asked innocently, clinging to the bar in anticipation.

The man glanced around him, looking uncomfortable. “Naw, we're really not allowed to talk about it,” he said, apologetic. “I don't really know all that much anyway.”

After that, Shaun stopped asking, but it didn't stop him from _wondering_. He often said to Nick, not a question he was requesting an answer to, just a talking point, “What's it like? Is the sky still blue? Are there birds? Is there grass? Do any people live out there?”

And Nick would reply, “Kid, I wish I knew.”

It really was his greatest wish, to know for sure what had truly become of the world; not only so he could tell Shaun, but to satisfy the curiosity that gnawed at him. It was getting stronger, the longer he spent down here away from the sun. (He was sure, if nothing else, the sun was still there. All the destructive power in the world could not destroy that one constant.) And it was stronger than mere curiosity; it was a longing to be out there, like he'd never felt before. Nick was never the kind of guy who wanted more than he had, or at least not more than he was capable of getting for himself. He'd always been content with his ability and his lot in life, grateful to have even that much.

Why couldn't he feel that way anymore? Because it wasn't a life of his own making? Because a child's natural curiosity had gotten the better of him? Whatever it was, he just felt like there was something out there to see, something more than the people here were letting on. Even if it really was all destroyed, burnt to nothing, he wished he could see it for himself.

He didn't bother asking though; he was fairly sure the answer would be the same for him as it was for Shaun. They were just two guinea pigs in a cage, after all.

As much as it eventually became something of a preoccupation, neither Nick nor Shaun let it keep them from doing what needed to be done, and there was plenty that needed to be done around the Institute. Shaun was in with Doctor Hatten most days, comparing his various biological systems with the ones they'd implemented on not just Nick but quite a few other synths. The process was going pretty well, apparently, and with their other advances in robotics and such, the scientists seemed to think they'd have a breakthrough before too long.

Nick wasn't sure how he felt about that, about the prospect of them making human-synths, but it wasn't his place to give his opinion. In fact, he didn't get all that involved with the scientists' projects at all. He saw Hatten about once a week, not counting days he just tagged along after Shaun. At first Brian had seemed to want his help with the memory-scan project he was doing, but after the first time, when Nick had complained about the discomfort, Brian had apparently given up on having Nick's involvement; he wasn't _rude_ when he saw him in the halls, but he did regard Nick with a coldness he didn't feel he'd done anything to deserve.

But sitting around like a bump on a log was never his style, so he found ways to keep busy. First he read everything he could get his hands on, absorbing information like a sponge, although it was almost entirely pre-war. Printed post-war materials were few and far between, what with the printing presses likely as obliterated as anything else. If more than what he found existed in the Institute, it was being guarded in one of the few areas he didn't have access to.

(As he read, he filtered through it all for things he could give to Shaun. There wasn't much in the way of kid-friendly material or fictional novels at all, because the Institute's founders had apparently found fiction frivolous when they'd built the place and neglected to bring much of it with them, but luckily Shaun enjoyed non-fiction maybe even more. He was surprisingly adept at understanding it too, his reading level far above what Nick thought was normal for a kid his age-- not that Nick knew much about what was normal for kids, let alone ones being raised by scientists.)

When he wasn't scouring the place for reading material, he did what he could to help out. Menial chores, for the most part, things that didn't require much more than just another pair of hands. He liked this sort of work because it tended to be performed in small companionable groups with friendly, chattery workers, who always had some gossip to share and _almost_ treated him like one of them. Cleaning, cooking (well, any part that didn't require taste buds), maintenance and repair; he did pretty much whatever people asked of him. He even began solving peoples' computer troubles. He had no idea what inspired anyone to ask him to try, except perhaps the assumption that, as a robot himself, he'd be good with machines, but he surprised himself by not being too bad at it. Talented enough, at least, that people kept coming to him for it when the technicians were too busy with their own secret projects to bother with the issues of the common folk.

Nick eventually settled into a nice little routine. It was nothing like living his old life, having a job and an apartment, bills to pay and social obligations to keep up with, but it wasn't bad. A year or two in and he found that some days he didn't even think about the past once, content with what he had (except for that gnawing nameless _need_ that he both felt and could read in Shaun's expression when he was quiet). He hadn't spoken to Brian in months when, one day, the man approached him while he was helping fix an automatic light sensor in one of the living-quarters' hallways.

“Valentine,” he said in greeting, looking like he hadn't been expecting to see him there, although it was clear that he had tracked him down.

Nick nodded; he might have raised a hand in a wave if he wasn't holding the ends of several cut wires in each. “Brian. There somethin' you need?”

Brian looked sidelong at the maintenance worker Nick was assisting. “Yes. When you're done here, can you come by my lab?”

“Sure...” Nick said, a little skeptical about the situation. But he figured that if Brian was willing to talk to him, he should be willing to listen, at least. After all, it hadn't been Nick who'd decided to cut off communication between them, and if Brian changed his mind, well then, that was his right. “I'll swing by in a little while.”

“Alright.” Brian nodded, turned heel, and left.

The maintenance worker asked if he knew what on earth that was about but Nick just shrugged. “No idea.”

So after they'd got the lights back in proper working order, Nick strolled down to lab 4, where he found Brian sifting casually through sheafs of notes. “So, what was it you needed to see me for?” he asked.

Setting aside the papers, Brian wasted little time getting down to it. “Do you remember the project I was working on some time ago? The cognitive processor testing. I'd like to start it up again.”

“Hmm. Isn't that the one you quit because I had a bad reaction to it?”

A slightly sour look came over Brian's face but he nodded. “We've refined the process, and I'm fairly certain it shouldn't have any ill effects this time. Under threat of having my research halted, I promise not to cause any harm to you. Lacroix would have my hide if I hindered Hatten's work.”

Nick didn't bother to mention that he was fairly certain Hatten was mostly done with him. They'd gotten most of the data they seemed to need about the function of an organic heart in a synthetic human, and so far Hatten hadn't indicated that Nick was a candidate for any further organ implementation. If something happened to him he was pretty sure their progress wouldn't be interrupted much-- not that Brian needed to know that. The fewer reasons for the technician to disregard Nick's personal well-being, the better.

To that end, he nodded along with Brian's promise; and he saw no reason not to believe him. If Lacroix had threatened him, Nick could be fairly certain that the technician would take the matter seriously, and do everything in his power to uphold his word. Still... Still Nick wasn't sure.

Clearly, Brian could see the hesitation on Nick's face. “I understand you're not keen on giving your time freely,” he said. “I have an idea of providing some form of compensation, should you decide to help me.”

Although he was glad that Brian was making such an offer (proving that there was value to this help he was hoping for, and that _he_ knew that _Nick_ knew it too), Nick couldn't help but smirk. “I don't see as there's much you could really offer me. Not much a robot man really _needs_ , you know?”

“No...” Brian said, nodding sideways, a sort of 'I suppose' gesture. “But there are things you want, aren't there? Maybe not only for you.”

_'Ah,_ Nick thought, as understanding sunk in. It was things for Shaun he was offering. As much as Nick thought of himself as immune to common bribery, he had to admit that this was perhaps his one weakness, these days. And as payment for something he'd have possibly agreed to anyway, it seemed a fair trade.

“I guess there are a few things the kid could use,” he conceded.

Brian grinned. “I'll see what I can find for you. But, material goods aren't my only offering. I've heard that Shaun has expressed an interest in an off-limits topic. As a researcher, I have a certain level of information regarding the outside world, and I may be willing to share some of it.”

Simultaneously, Nick both decided to help Brian and thought suddenly that maybe he shouldn't. He'd never liked the man all that much to begin with, but the way he spoke now, offering up illicit information like this-- it made Nick feel dirty. He didn't especially agree with the Institute's rule about not discussing the world above, but it _was_ a rule, and one which he expected their highest-ranking leaders should uphold if it was so darn important.

That curiosity though, it was gnawing at him, and it was gnawing at Shaun too.

“Alright,” Nick said in his bargaining voice. “So how's this gonna work? I help you out today and you answer any questions me'n the kid might have?”

Brian laughed. “That doesn't give you much incentive to help me _again_ , does it? I think one question per hour of help. What do you say to that?”

Nick thought about it. It wasn't as good as getting all of his answers upfront, but it seemed fair enough. He stuck out his hand; Brian seemed surprised for a moment and Nick wondered if handshakes had fallen out of vogue and he'd never got the memo. But then the technician reciprocated the gesture, after a moment of confusion, and they shook on it. “I'd say you've got yourself a deal,” Nick said. “As long as I don't wake up with a splitting headache again. Or in another body.”

“I'm fairly certain you won't,” Brian said confidently. “Now are you willing to start immediately?”

“I don't see why not,” Nick said, and they made their way to that semi-familiar room, the one which might have featured in Nick's nightmares if he had any, but which he knew was really no worse than any other room in their little underground city. He sat, and a variety of technicians and assistants came forward to attach all the necessary wires and such, then settled in at their stations, Brian at the forefront.

“As before,” he started, looking professional with his hands behind his back, “when you feel the pull, follow it. Oh and if you have any... dreams while you're asleep, please let me know.”

“Sure,” Nick said with a casual shrug. “Hey, but before we get started, I think it's fair for you to answer one of my questions.”

The techs and assistants around the room gave Brian enthusiastically acquiescent looks as he glanced around at them before returning his focus to Nick. “I suppose. What was it you wanted to know?”

There were innumerable questions that either he had wondered or Shaun had asked over the past years, but there was just one that first came to mind as being... viscerally important; the kind of thing he needed to know in order to have peace of mind. “Is the sky still _blue_?”

Brian laughed, a sort of noise that was almost pleasant-sounding in its lack of ambition. (Nick also noticed a young tech woman look away with a soft smile on her face.) “Sometimes,” he said shortly.

That was enough for Nick, proof enough that the world wasn't completely destroyed. If the sky was still blue (sometimes; and other times grey, or pink and purple, or the muddy color you sometimes got when the weather didn't know what it was doing, he assumed), then there was still something worthwhile up there.

“Thanks,” he said, closing his eyes and imagining the depths of blue the sky might still be. But then he opened his eyes again. “Wait. One more thing. Don't keep me under too long. Shaun'll wonder where I've got off to if I'm gone all night.”

“A fair request,” Brian said with a nod. “I'll keep it in mind.” He signaled the technician at the appropriate console to start the process, and when Nick felt the pull, he let it claim him with little hesitation.

When the old Nick Valentine awoke, he was strapped down to the chair (and annoyed about it, sure; who wouldn't be?), but he didn't feel the primal rage towards the technicians that he remembered feeling previously. He was, at worst, frustrated that Brian had found his other-self's one weakness.

“Sorry about the restraints,” Brian said, gazing at Nick curiously from a slight distance. “I wasn't sure how you were going to react this time. The new you seemed willing to cooperate, but I thought it best not to take chances. How are _you_ feeling about the situation?”

Nick opted for honesty. “I haven't decided,” he said, “but I'm not planning on getting violent, so I think you can let me loose.”

Brian nodded an assistant in Nick's direction, and she hurried over to undo the straps, looking nervously apologetic as Nick caught her eye.

“Thanks,” he told her as she scurried back to her station. He looked back to Brian, a little suspicious but just as much curious. “So you've decided against torture after all? I don't figure you'd have let me up if you were planning to shock the information outta me.”

“Yes, but don't think that means I'm going to let you out of here without getting the data I need.” He took a long slow step sideways, subconsciously putting himself in between Nick and the door, even though Nick made no movement to leave his seat.

Nick scoffed. “We might be here a while then. I still don't trust you lot farther than I can throw you.”

“And I can't make you,” Brian said. “All I can do is give you incentives and hope you take them.”

There was a space of silence then, while the two men sized each other up. The techs kept themselves busy fiddling with their various equipment and notes. Finally, Nick asked, “and what might those incentives be?”

“Material comforts for you and the boy, of course. And answers to those burning questions you have.”

'Those burning questions.' Nick grumbled. “It's pretty shady that you Institute folks won't talk about the outside. Almost like you're worried people might wanna leave.”

“That's it exactly,” Brian said with a shrug. “But I have promised to tell you whatever you want to know, and I intend to keep that promise. So long as you uphold your end of the bargain, that is.

“And what if I don't?” Nick asked. “We sit here 'til the cows come home? 'Cuz I'm pretty sure I _can_ do that, but I'm not so sure about you.”

Again Brian looked rather like the cat who'd caught the canary. “Oh, no, I'd let you out. There's no point in keeping you here if you aren't going to cooperate. But I'd make your life rather miserable-- behind the scenes, of course. It wouldn't be fair to the other Mr. Valentine; he's been fairly easy to work with. But maybe a little discomfort would make you think twice next time I get you in here.”

It wasn't a very impressive threat, in Nick's opinion, and he was about to say so until Brian continued, as if it were an afterthought (though it clearly wasn't), “and when I say 'make your life miserable', I mean Shaun just as much as your other self. He really seems to be enjoying his freedom, doesn't he? Running around with you, meeting all the workers. You know I think I saw him playing with one of the other children the other day. But he _is_ , first and foremost, an important experiment. As much as we try, even our beloved Institute isn't free of dangers. A word to Lacroix would make her see that Shaun ought to be kept locked up where he is safe.”

By the time the technician was done running his mouth, Nick was gritting his teeth so hard it would have given him a headache if he were any closer to human. The two of them stared hard at each other for a good minute, and then Nick asked, in a voice that might sound threatening if everyone in the room weren't aware of just how powerless he was, “What do you wanna know?”

Brian smiled, wide and friendly, and clasped his hands behind his back. He looked very pleased with himself. “I _thought_ you'd come around.”

They spent the next few hours asking a wide variety of questions, instructing him to answer in as much detail as he could. 'How many ways are there to get into Goodneighbor? Is there anyone who might know the city's secrets?' 'Have you been to Far Harbor? Does Acadia sound familiar?' 'Do you know any pre-war ghouls? and what are their names? and where do they live?' 'What have you heard of the Minutemen? Where is their base?' 'Have you ever encountered a super mutant? How intelligent did they seem to you?' 'How many vaults do you know of? Have you ever been inside one?'

Nick hated every word that came out of his mouth as he answered their questions, even though many of them seemed completely innocuous. There simply was no way the Institute wouldn't put every bit of this information to good use-- and anything useful to them was usually to the detriment of the people of the Commonwealth. He considered fabricating some of the information, but only for a moment; he didn't want to risk what might happen if they found out. Then he thought of padding the truths with so much extraneous data that it was difficult to parse, but he didn't want to give the clever bastards anything extra that they could potentially use. So, in the end, he just gave them what they asked for.

At least Brian stopped looking smug as they got involved in collecting all Nick's explanations. It was just about the only credit Nick could give him, that he was dedicated enough to his research to stop being insufferable long enough to work on his project.

The hours did eventually pass, though it felt like forever to Nick. Brian checked a time read-out on his console and hummed. “Well, I did promise you I wouldn't keep you too long. Your other self, that is. Time to get you back, then. We can pick this up at a later date.”

Nick Valentine awoke feeling a little irritable, but not in any pain or discomfort, at least. Most of his annoyance faded when Brian happily offered to answer any three new questions he might have about the world above, and by the time he'd found Shaun and relayed the new information to him (with the caveat that the kid had to pretend he didn't know), he was feeling fairly cheerful. The whole next week, he could just see it on Shaun's face, the kid was lost in fantastic daydreams about the Commonwealth, and it made it worth Nick's slight misgivings about working with Brian.

When Brian came around again a few weeks later, Nick was prepared to make the trade: his time for Brian's answers. When he fell asleep (in a more comfortable chair this time, less clinical) and woke as the man he'd been before, he was far less bothered than he'd been previous times. It probably helped that the head technician wasn't around when Nick opened his eyes.

“Huh. Where's the boss?” he asked.

One of the tech's assistants came forward to stand where Brian usually did. “He's got some other work to do today. He gave us a list of topics to go over.”

It was the same fare as before, but the atmosphere was different with one of the lesser technicians in charge. They didn't rush him to answer, and didn't seem to mind when he got wandering off on a tangent, some winding story maybe only half related to the question at hand. This was something he'd started doing on purpose, once he realized they weren't as strict as their boss. It gave him time to think while making it appear that he was being more cooperative than they could have asked. (And, honestly, they seemed to enjoy his tales.)

During a short break, which Nick had suggested and the techs had readily agreed to, he turned his thoughts toward himself. Now that he had the chance for introspection, he realized that his memory of his past as a human was so much clearer than it had been before, back when he'd been a wanderer. His memories of Nick Valentine the Detective had been so patchy, much like the rest of him, so much so that it had been pretty easy to distance himself from that life, and to think of himself as an entirely different person from that man. But his new self, the one that only wandered these sterile halls, he seemed to think of himself as really no different from the human. At first Nick had wondered why, but now it made some sense. He'd woken up with all his memories intact, whereas the _old_ synth-Nick had had to start almost from scratch when he woke up in that trash heap in the Commonwealth. He guessed the lack of clarity he'd had then was due to some sort of corruption in his memory data.

To be honest, he thought maybe it was better this way. Although his own sense of self made him doubt that he ( _they)_ were the same as the human they'd been modeled after, he thought a stronger identity would keep him on the right path, especially in a place like this that seemed to inhibit personality in the name of science.

The only issue was getting out of there. New-Nick had hardly even considered leaving-- although the idea would be presenting itself as a more and more tantalizing possibility, the more he learned about the outside; Nick knew himself well enough to predict that. The trouble was in getting his other self to make a move, to stop being complacent. What would it take for him to decide he couldn't stay any longer? Some sort of disaster? Nothing like that was likely to happen. Even Brian's threat of locking up Shaun-- would that be enough?

Nick thought long and hard (between key telling-points of his stories) over the next few sessions. What sort of seed could he plant in his other-self's mind to make him want to escape? And _how_ , when everything he thought was locked away at the end of the day?

As it happened, it was not Nick's doing at all that first gave him the idea to leave.

Shaun was getting older. He was long past toddler age, and though still nowhere near an adult (nor even teen age) he was apparently deemed old enough or mature enough to stop being just a test subject and start taking a more proactive role in the Institute's research. The scientists began to train him as one of their own. Too little too late, in Nick's opinion. They hadn't taken a personal interest in him when he was tiny and lonely and vulnerable; any attention they gave him now couldn't count for much. But at least they were teaching him. He enjoyed the interaction and the learning, and in the evenings he came to find Nick so he could tell him all about what they'd covered that day.

One day when he showed up, he seemed an unusual mix of excited and solemn, the two emotions mixing to a shade of confusion on his face.

“What's goin' on, kid?” Nick asked, as he took a break from idly polishing a diner table. The workers he'd been chatting with excused themselves to give the two some room; though Shaun usually didn't mind a crowd, the look on his face made it clear that today's conversation was bound to be personal-- something the boy would want to say to Nick alone.

“Mmm...” Shaun hummed. The hesitation was unlike him, but Nick made no assumptions and didn't rush him. “I... learned something today. ...Do you wanna hear it?”

“Sure,” Nick replied. He motioned for Shaun to take a seat across from him, not exactly their 'usual spot' (they didn't have one; they could be found talking in nearly any corner around this time of evening, depending on what Nick was working on when Shaun found him), but it was a place they ended up in often enough to be comfortable to them.

So Shaun sat. He put his elbows up on the table and fiddled with his hands. “Did you know...” he started after a minute. “Did you know I'm adopted?”

That wasn't what Nick had been expecting (not that he was expecting anything in particular). “Well I'm sure not your real father,” he said, playing off a feeling they never really talked about but which was sort of obvious to anyone, that if Shaun had anything even close to a parent it would absolutely be Nick. Nick had never been a parent before (Hell, he'd never even been an uncle or anything), but halfway through the first year of looking after Shaun, he realized that that was what he was feeling: paternal instinct.

Shaun's excited and worried expression mellowed out into a small smile and he laughed softly. But still the anxiety was there. “I know,” he said, a little melancholy. “I'm from above-ground, in the Commonwealth. My parents were from a vault. That's what they told me today.” He looked down at his hands, and then back up at Nick, seeking some sort of response.

Nick was a little surprised, both at what Shaun had just said and that the scientists had told him. “Really now? A vault? What do you know about vaults?”

“That they're other safe places, built underground,” Shaun answered. “But they're not as good as the Institute, and most of them got ruined already.”

That was about Nick's understanding too. From what he'd heard, there were maybe hundreds of vaults built around the US: sprawling underground bunkers where people could wait out the destruction and emerge when it was over. According to Brian, they didn't all work according to plan, and many of them had opened too soon-- if they'd even survived that long and hadn't succumbed to cannibalism or similar problems. Nick would have thought Brian was just trying to scare him with more above-ground horror stories, but he'd also mentioned that some of the vaults _were_ still functioning, acting as the rare haven in an otherwise desolate land.

Shaun continued, apparently not done with his revelations. “They said my parents were from before the war, so I have really pure DNA. That's why they're making the synths from me.”

Now that both made sense and didn't make sense at all. If Shaun's parents were pre-war, then they definitely stood a better chance of not being affected by radiation at a genetic level, which was, according to the Institute, the problem with today's people, because even those in vaults or there in the Institute still suffered from the radiation that leaked through the ground and into the water. But the war had happened over a hundred years ago (again, according to the Institute, and it was always possible that they were lying to him). If Shaun's parents had been alive back then, they'd have to be either dead now or perhaps ghouls. (Another thing he'd learned about from Brian recently. It made him shiver.) And Shaun was only maybe eight years old, unless... he was a clone?

“Did they tell you anything else?” Nick asked.

“Uhn-uh,” Shaun said, shaking his head. He still looked very distracted, so Nick paused his theorizing to ask what was going on in his head. He replied, “Do you think they're out there? My parents. Because some of the vaults are still safe, right?”

He looked so hopeful, there was no way Nick was going to say no. But he'd always been honest with the kid, and he wasn't going to stop now. “If they were from before the war, they'd be pretty old now,” he mentioned, knowing Shaun would understand what he was implying.

“Yeah, but-- but maybe they found out how to live for a really long time! Some of the vaults were science places, just like this one. They could have figured it out!”

If their own Institute had figured out how to make not only synths, but ones that were nearly human (and they were close now, very close), then Nick supposed another group of scientists could have discovered the key to living for hundreds of years. “Maybe you're right,” he conceded, and Shaun went from biting his lower lip to grinning widely.

“I wish I could meet them,” Shaun said, sighing, and Nick could see in the far-away look in his eyes that the kid was already imagining it, drawing pictures in his head about what they'd look like and how happy they'd be to see him again after all this time.

“I wish you could too,” Nick told him, and he didn't have to say 'but you know they won't let you'; Shaun knew plenty well enough that it would be useless to ask.

“Maybe one day, though,” he said.  
  
Nick nodded and tried to seem optimistic. “Sure, one day.” And he told himself that it was possible. Maybe, one day, after they'd perfected the human-synths, after they'd completed their goal, maybe the Institute would have no more use for them and would let them out into the wide world to finally _live_ a life. Maybe. One day. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I am convinced that the world is not a mere bog in which men and women trample themselves and die. Something magnificent is taking place here amidst the cruelties and tragedies, and the supreme challenge to intelligence is that of making the noblest and best in our curious heritage prevail._   
>  _-Charles Austin Beard_

Nick was about as excited as ever to continue working with Brian, which was to say 'moderately'. But his other personality, when he woke some minutes later, was brimming with questions that would have been eating at him all week if he'd been awake for it. He was glad to find that the boss was around this time, because he wasn't sure any of the lesser techs were going to be able to answer him.

He tried not to seem too eager, lest he give Brian more ammunition that he could use in who-knows-what way, so he relaxed and leaned back in his seat. “Before we get started today, I was hoping you could fill me in a little. The other day, Shaun told me his parents were from a vault.”

“That's what I hear,” Brian affirmed, looking the slightest bit bored.

“He said they were from before the war,” Nick said, tilting his head. “How's that possible?”

Brian made a short gesture with his right arm, reminiscent of a stunted shrug and a dismissive wave, indicating that he wasn't especially interested in the current conversation. “Cryo-stasis,” he said. “One of Vault-tec's many projects, and one of the few that seems to have worked.”

That made more sense than the idea that Shaun's parents could have been ghouls or otherwise weirdly long-lived. But if they weren't mutants of some sort and they hadn't died, then why weren't they here? Unless they _had_ died? A cryo-pod malfunction that left only Shaun alive? “Where are they now?”

“Still frozen, I imagine.” Brian seemed exasperated to have to bother answering such questions. “I wasn't involved, so I don't know exactly what went on. We only have Kellogg's word that the child even came from the vault in the first place and isn't some Commonwealth orphan. I haven't the slightest clue about the parents. You'll have to talk to Lacroix or Kellogg if you want the full story. Now I'm done with this topic.”

“Pfft, touchy subject, huh?”

Brian would say no more about it, and was in a noticeably worse mood for the rest of the session, sitting back and letting one of his assistants handle most of the questioning. He interjected periodically with sharp comments about how Nick needed to hurry up with his storytelling or he'd get back to shocking him, to hell with what the Director said. Nick didn't believe it, but only because he knew that Brian wouldn't risk his job. The man clearly hated even having to think about Shaun or the project the kid was involved in though. Nick wanted to ask what his hang-up was, but he wasn't going to waste his questions on something that probably wasn't all that important, particularly as Brian didn't seem likely to answer him anyway.

Instead, Nick tried to figure out how he could talk to either of the two people the tech had mentioned. Director Lacroix didn't make personal appearances very often, and he definitely wasn't going to be able to get out of the lab with his memories intact in order to go track her down and ask for further answers. And Kellogg? Nick didn't even really know who that was. Someone else involved in acquiring Shaun. Maybe... probably the wastelander who'd showed up the same day he was captured. He thought he remembered the name of the man who'd held the little red-headed baby with that casual ease as workers and scientists looked on in awe. He almost laughed, remembering how he'd thought Shaun looked as normal as any other baby he'd ever seen. These days, he clearly saw both sides: the kid was as normal as anyone, and more special than everyone.

He wondered how Shaun's parents felt. Did they miss him? Had they given him up willingly? It just didn't feel likely, especially with how rotten the Institute had time-and-again proven itself to be. If what Brian said was true, and they were still frozen, then maybe they didn't even know he was gone. Snatched right out from under their comatose noses. What a sad thought. They deserved to have him back.

Even more, Shaun deserved to have his parents. He'd never asked to be taken from them and raised so carelessly in this terrible place.

But how...? How could Nick orchestrate delivering the kid back to his parents, when he couldn't even get himself out of this room intact? Aside from escaping (which would probably require knocking out everyone in the room and then being lucky enough not to get caught out in the hall), the only thing he could think of would be to send himself a message. It'd have to be something obvious, a word or phrase that couldn't be interpreted differently. Maybe he could leave a note somewhere he knew his other self would find it: in the message-box of a worker whose computer often failed, or in a book he could be counted on to re-read? Or... on himself.

Suddenly it became obvious. He couldn't get out of the room, and the techs would _never_ let him on to one of their consoles, not for the life of them, but he might be able to find a pen without them noticing. They still did roughly half of their paperwork in handwritten forms; he could see at least three clipboards sitting around, ink pens lying atop them or tucked under the clip.

First things first, he knew he couldn't do this too quickly. Over the months of sessions, Nick had mostly sat still while he had answered their questions. If he got up and started walking around, they'd be suspicious. So he re-situated himself. A few minutes later he fidgeted. He tapped his foot. He folded his hands in his lap, then later stretched them out on the chair's arms. He made it seem natural, and he continued telling his long-winded stories and didn't speed them up in the slightest, to Brian's continued annoyance. By the end of the session, he hadn't yet stood up, but he'd managed to be sitting on the edge of his seat and not get any weird looks for it.

It wasn't until the next time (more than a week later) when he finally stood, an hour into it. Brian scowled at him but didn't ask what the hell he was doing. And Nick didn't do anything more than that. He stood, then a little later he sat on the arm of the chair. Then he stood again, and walked around the back of the chair and leaned on it.

On the third day, he made a slow circuit of the room, leaning mostly against walls and scouting out places he could stand where he wasn't directly in the line of sight of most of the techs if they were working on their computers. He had several chances to grab a pen, but he knew he probably wouldn't get away with his plan while Brian was watching, so he waited.

In the end it took seven weeks for Nick to send himself a message-- and it took a day and half for him to notice.

The thing was, Nick didn't change clothes every day. He didn't sweat and the whole Institute was so damn clean that the only time his clothes got dirty at all was if he was helping out with a dirty job, and even heavy janitorial work typically didn't soil his clothes enough that they needed to be replaced. It was lucky (though he certainly didn't see it that way at the time) that he met a particularly horrible toilet that day, which was both filthy and uncooperative. As soon as he was finished with the thing (and glad they hadn't given him that digestive system after all) he hurried back to his room to change out of the soiled garments. And that was when he saw it, though he almost didn't, in his haste to change.

“Kellc?” he read aloud, trying to decipher the writing on the inside of his left wrist. “Kello?” It was written in blue ink, like from a ballpoint pen, and if he wasn't mistaken it seemed to be his own handwriting, although far messier than it looked on paper. It also looked like it'd been interrupted, like he (or whoever had sneaked into his room when he was unconscious and decided to graffiti his arm) had been trying to write something longer but had to pull away suddenly. That was why he wasn't sure if the last letter was a 'c' or an 'o'. 'Kello' seemed more like a real word than 'Kellc', but what on earth was either of them supposed to mean? And why would he have writing on his arm (in what looked like his own handwriting) that he didn't remember putting there? (He was pretty sure he'd have woken up if someone else started writing on him, but he wouldn't rule it out just yet.)

The circumstances were weird, definitely, and instinctively he wanted to figure out how this had happened, but he thought the word itself might be the more important thing to focus on. After all, why would someone write something on his arm, clearly meant for him to see, if it wasn't pretty important?

“Kello... kello...” He sat down on the bed and repeated the word to himself, but it just didn't ring a bell. For a minute he thought it could have just been 'Hello' badly written, but the 'K' was pretty clearly not an 'H'.

It was late enough to be nearly bed time. Normally Nick would have checked in with Shaun and spent an hour or two talking about the day or hypothesizing about the world above-ground. Instead he left his room and headed the opposite direction, towards the kitchens area. He was pretty sure the cook on duty was one he got along with rather well, and that the man would let him use his computer without asking why.

“Need a little late-night coding time, huh?” the man asked when Nick made the request. Nick just laughed along with him even though he was fairly certain the comment was supposed to be a suggestive joke about his being a robot.

“Oh sure, you know how it is,” he responded. “By the way--” He stopped himself before he could ask if the man knew what 'kello' was. He didn't know why, but he felt like it was something that was supposed to be kind of a secret. “Uh, never mind.”

The Institute's computers weren't all connected to each other, but most of them were connected to a central server so they could send messages back and forth and access some general unrestricted data, including schedules and open community requests. He started there, browsing through the message boards for any mention of 'kello', though he didn't find one. Guessing it might be a name, he began to check schedules and dormitory listings, but nobody currently living there was called that. There _was_ a Kelly, but Nick didn't think it was her he was looking for. He decided to go meet her the next day if he didn't find a better lead, but he kept looking.

His only other thought was that it might be something the scientists were working on-- a project code name or the name of a new drug or chemical maybe. They didn't keep their project data on the open channels though. As much as this was a community completely based around scientific research, the higher-ups still kept everyone else in the dark about a lot of their experiments until they were already in their later stages. Information about those kind of projects would be kept under lock and key-- or password and firewall, which might as well be the same thing.

Except they weren't, because even the most talented thief couldn't pick a lock from a different location entirely. Conversely, Nick was almost certain that you _could_ do that with computer security. In theory. He tested the theory by poking around in the computer's settings and various password fields and eventually finding himself in listings that hadn't been available to him previously, though he wasn't quite sure how he did it.

An hour or two of searching and hacking got him into a few of the scientist's supposedly secure data repositories, but didn't yield any results. Anxiety crept up on him the more he looked, so he decided to call it a night instead of testing his luck any further. He had no idea what would happen if someone caught him looking at these files, but he didn't want to risk it, and he didn't want to potentially get the computer's owner in trouble either.

He resolved to try again another evening and backed out of the secure files. Before he left to head back to his room, he found the schedule of the woman called Kelly; he still didn't think she was what the mysterious writing on his arm was referring to, but it couldn't hurt to meet her anyway, since he had no other clues.

Sleep didn't come easily that night. Hours ticked by as Nick wondered and theorized and flat-out guessed what this could all be about. His best conclusion, by the time he finally fell asleep, was that he'd written it on himself in his sleep. Maybe this ought to have made his whole investigation dismissable (plenty of cops and other reasonable people would have written it off as no more important than a dream, something nonsensical put together by a sleeping mind and less consequential than a child's ramblings), but combined with his general unease of late and his admitted lack of knowledge about the inner workings of his own self, Nick thought it was entirely possible, maybe even probable, that there really was something going on. He was a robot living in the post-apocalypse, after all; the idea that he'd written in his sleep a codeword for some unremembered mystery was not all that crazy.

When the morning came and he met Shaun to keep him company during breakfast, he debated telling him about his new adventure. The boy was curious where he'd been the previous night, but when Nick just said that he was working on someone's computer, Shaun readily accepted it, and Nick decided that (for the time being, at least) he wouldn't bother the kid with more unanswered questions. He still had plenty of those in the form of his curiosity about the Commonwealth, which only grew with every new answer-- a perpetually insatiable appetite.

They went their separate ways after the morning meal: Shaun to go study with one of Hatten's aides, Nick to try and meet the woman called Kelly and hope he could make it seem natural.

“Valentine, right?” she asked when he greeted her. “Can I help you?”

She worked in an area Nick had never really had a reason to visit much before, in charge of lending out gear to anyone (human or synth) who might be leaving the Institute for whatever reason, and for cataloging it when they returned. It was easy enough for him to claim that he was just curious about what was down here.

“Just takin' a look, if that's alright with you,” he said, giving her as charming a smile as he could manage. “Been around here long enough by now I kinda thought it was a shame I still haven't met everyone.”

Kelly looked pleased that he would deviate from his usual routine just to take an interest in her and her work. “Oh, well feel free to look around,” she said, maybe just a hint of color rising in her face. “In front of the gate, though, obviously.”

The majority of the stock was behind a locked chain-link fence. There were folded stacks of armor (some leather, some metal), a variety of guns that looked vastly more powerful than what he used to carry (mostly military, by the looks of them), and piles of other miscellany. He saw what looked like a collection of medication in bottles and syringes and wondered if the above-ground was really so disease-ridden that even short trips to the Commonwealth meant you needed to take the whole pharmacy with you.

None of that was what he'd come for, though, so he struck up conversation with Kelly as he browsed the shelves he had access to.

“Hear any interesting news lately?” he asked, turning a worn helmet around in his hands. (There was a little instinct biting at the back of his mind, telling him to put it on his head. He ignored it.)

“Not really,” Kelly said. Then she went 'Ah!' and held up a finger. “Unless you count the new synths. It's not really news, I know, but they're pretty impressive, aren't they? I saw one the other day and I was almost fooled. I was like 'who's the new guy?', y'know? Then he opened his mouth and ruined the illusion. Guess they've still got some kinks to work out.”

They chatted about the realism of the newer generation of synths (which the scientists had taken to calling “Gen 3”) and their opinions of the progress they'd made since Nick (“Gen 2”, apparently, and just about one of a kind). Kelly was optimistically neutral about them. Nick didn't have a strong opinion, so they were able to have a pretty low-key conversation that slowly transitioned into a variety of other topics. Kelly turned out to be pretty nice to talk to, but by the time an hour or two had passed, Nick was pretty sure she didn't have anything to do with the writing on his arm.

“It was nice talkin' with ya, Kelly,” he said, nodding and tipping his invisible hat.

“You too,” she said with a wave and a friendly grin. “If you ever go top-side, come back and I'll set you up!”

At this point, it was too early to find a computer and return to his hacking, despite how much it pulled at him, so he went and helped out around the common areas until Shaun found him during his lunch break.

“How's your morning been?” he asked the kid.

Shaun shrugged with one arm. “Alright,” he said, between two overstuffed mouthfuls of what was supposed to be mashed potatoes. “I'm learning about, um, regenerative brain stem tissue. Doctor Hatten said they're having a hard time with the new synth's brains. She got mad at one of the aides when he said it was because they had a bad donor, but he was just joking. What did you do all morning?”

Nick passed a napkin Shaun's way, laughing at his messy enthusiasm over lunch. (He wasn't sure if it was because he wanted to get back to working with Hatten or if he was just hungry. He guessed it was the second one; the kid was still infatuated with his freedom to eat whatever he wanted since they'd finished testing the digestive system implementation and lifted his restrictions.) “I had a chat with a girl down in the supply room,” Nick told him.

He must have been smiling or something because Shaun got a teasing look on his face. “Ooh, a _girl_ ,” he said, drawing out the word. “Do you _like_ her?”

Laughing, Nick waved the notion away. “I don't _dis_ like her, but that's got nothin' to do with why I went down there.”

“Uh-huh,” Shaun said, giving him a sly disbelieving look, a small bit of attitude he probably picked up from working with the younger techs. “What's your excuse?”

Honestly, Nick really wanted to tell Shaun. It wasn't as if there was usually any potential for secrets between them anyway, but they always told each other anything that was going on in their lives and all their stray thoughts and ideas (aside from the ones that weren't really appropriate for children, and Nick didn't have _too_ many of those). He looked around. There were, as always, plenty of people milling about. None of them seemed to be paying the two of them any attention, but that didn't mean that nobody could hear them, and if there was any amount of secrecy in what was being said, chances were that somebody was going to be listening, if only because juicy gossip was so rare in their little community.

“Let's just say it's a case I'm working on,” he said. “I'll fill you in on the details once I've got a good angle on it.”

Shaun's demeanor changed almost instantly, as he realized that Nick wasn't kidding. “A real case?” he asked, sounding again like the child he was instead of the pre-teen he sometimes acted like. “Can I help?”

Nick would have loved to have Shaun's help, but he was still worried it might be a bad idea to get the kid involved, so little he knew about the situation. “I'll let you know if I think of anything you can help with,” he told him, and it wasn't exactly what Shaun wanted to hear, but he accepted it easily enough. He nodded and went back to shoveling lunch into his mouth, though maybe with a little more composure.

When evening came and Shaun was winding down for the day, Nick stopped by briefly to say goodnight.

“Are you going to go work on your case?” Shaun asked. It was clear he'd been thinking about it.

“That's the plan,” Nick said. And before Shaun could ask, he assured him, “If I find anything good, you'll be the first to know.”

“Wake me up?” Shaun requested.

Nick nodded. “Will do,” he said, before bidding Shaun a good night and heading out to find a console he could work on.

It was entirely possible that it didn't matter, that nobody was even going to notice him poking around in the innards of the scientist's most sensitive data, but he decided not to take the chance. Though it wouldn't stop him from getting caught, he made the conscious decision not to use the same computer he'd used previously. If he could get into their data remotely, it seemed likely that they could _see_ him getting in. Switching computers wasn't going to throw them off his trail entirely, if they were really that inclined to find him, but he figured it couldn't hurt.

The living-quarters maintenance manager practically loved Nick, ecstatic that someone was actually willing to help him with dirty jobs and not really expect anything in return. When Nick asked if he could borrow the use of his office's console for the evening, the man was beyond acquiescent.

Having already determined that the common forums weren't going to yield results, he dove immediately back into the scientist's secure files. The data he'd found the previous night was all pretty inconsequential, but he hadn't known what he was really looking for either. Even tonight he still lacked any clues to point him in the right direction, but he wasn't grasping at straws quite so much. As much as instinct had always served him as a detective, he decided to focus on being methodical instead of wandering where his feet led him, so to speak. After all, he couldn't really hack data files purely through intuition.

The files he'd gotten into the night before had been easy, relatively speaking; that was why he'd found so little, he figured. Security was bound to be pretty low on information that hardly passed for classified. The opposite was also likely to be true. The Institute's most secret secrets were going to be the ones most difficult to break into. Unfortunately, Nick had no idea if 'kello' was one of those big secrets, or something practically common knowledge that he just hadn't stumbled across yet, and he didn't want to waste his time hacking into, say, Director Lacroix's files if the answers he sought were available much further down the chain of command.

Then again...

'Kello' was priority, he told himself. 'Kello' was the mystery he needed to solve. But thinking about the sort of things he might find in the Director's own data files... There was a twinge of fear and excitement and terrible looming suspense, and Nick was absolutely certain (if only for a moment) that Lacroix was hiding something big.

It didn't much matter, though, because one look at the security on her files and Nick knew he'd never get in. Not without more time and practice, at the very least.

He settled on what he saw as a compromise between the instinct that bit at him and the logic he tried to employ: he hacked into Hatten's files instead. Her data was much less secure, the large part of it being the Institute's most famous work, yet it was still sensitive enough that he thought it might yield some results. And it... didn't, if what he was looking for was any mention of 'kello', but it was still enlightening to get an insider perspective (well, an _adult_ insider perspective) on the details of the organic synths. He read the reports of how the various biological systems were all getting along, how they'd decided to forgo certain systems entirely (the skeletal system, for one; organic bone proved to be of little benefit compared to carbon steel; the reproductive system, also, they'd decided was unnecessary), at least for the time being.

There was a more detailed explanation of his own heart as well, information he was surprised he didn't know: the way the heart (like the other synths' organs, apparently) had been artificially aged, its growth sped up to match his size; how it pumped neither blood nor standard synth coolant but a specialized electrolytic liquid designed to both fuel the living cells and cool his mechanical systems; and that (according to Hatten's hypothesis) if his heart were to fail, he would have at most a day to live, before his delicate electronics would overheat and likely fry.

It was a frightening thought, though a moot point. He couldn't imagine having a catastrophic heart failure and not being able to receive treatment for it nearly immediately. Still it made him hyper-aware of how fragile life could be, even life that was 95% synthetic.

But any worries he had about himself faded away when he stumbled upon a report about Shaun. His name was littered throughout Hatten's logs, as one might expect, but this particular report was all about him. Neutral in tone, like most of the scientists' data, it cataloged every surgery the boy had undergone, from the recent all the way back to the day he was brought in. There was a detailed description of each procedure, including successes and complications and the location and appearance of the scars they left.

Nick was softly horrified. He knew the tissue for each cloned organ had come from Shaun. He understood that they'd have had to have taken the samples surgically. But seeing them listed there, so precise and uncaring, the processes in such great detail, it made him really consider the atrocity of it all. Honestly, how dare they cut open a tiny child's _heart_ just so they could give one to a robot like him. He didn't need it! None of the synths needed the parts they'd been given, _none_ of them!

Stewing quietly in an emotion not quite rage but stronger than disappointment, Nick continued to read. He felt it only fair that if Shaun had to undergo this pain (and bear the scars still, according to the reports) then he should at least take the time to acknowledge it.

Most of the surgeries had happened when the boy was much younger. In recent years he'd had no more than one every few months, as they'd already collected most of the samples they felt they needed, but when Shaun was quite little they'd been more frequent. Before Nick awoke, during the first four or five years of the boy's life, they'd operated on him nearly as often as they could, giving him just enough time to recover from the previous surgery before they pushed on with the next. His first had been the very same day he'd arrived-- just a skin sample, but a procedure nonetheless. The report estimated he'd been only a month old, and already he was just an experiment to them. A test subject. A guinea pig.

The feeling this data left him with was difficult to reconcile. It was nothing he hadn't already known, to a degree, but now that he was more aware of it he wondered why he hadn't really thought about it before. It was just too uncomfortable, he guessed, to be in a situation where you felt like you didn't have any control over the bad things that might be happening so you just didn't let yourself think about it.

And now he couldn't _stop_ thinking about it.

But he also couldn't stop delving deeper into Hatten's logs, fearful and hopeful both that there was something even worse to be found there; fearful because he didn't want to know that he was living among monsters; hopeful because he was already afraid of them (he always had been, even when he smiled and joked with them) and he wanted definitive proof to support that fear.

In truth, he hadn't expected to find it, not there in kindly old Hatten's files. She was his favorite scientist by far, after all, mostly frightening only by her association with the rest of them-- and the fact that she went along with their plans without protest, the kind of person who maybe wouldn't _suggest_ cutting into a newborn, but apparently didn't see enough evil in it to refuse. That _she_ was the best of them maybe should have said something.

His thoughts of Hatten aside, Nick was surprised that he did find something there in her files, when he looked deeper into reports tagged with his own name. Again, no mention of 'kello', but mysterious all the same: the earliest logs of his heart transplant, dated almost a year before he woke.

The earliest entries were matter-of-fact medical data. The heart was grown to the right size. It was ready to install. They swapped all his coolant for the electrolyte fluid then put the heart in, and it functioned as intended but there was no way to test it properly until he was awake. They monitored its rhythm for a few weeks, and saw no change. Then there was a more personal entry; the writing style made it clear that it was written by Hatten herself, not an assistant. She was annoyed almost beyond coherence that someone had disregarded her requests in regard to 'the subject', who had been woken very much without her approval.

'The subject', Nick understood, was him. But he didn't remember being woken then. He read on.

The subject had been woken, Hatten wrote, and then shut off when it was found that he would not cooperate. She'd had to repeat her weeks of monitoring to make sure nothing had gone awry from deviating from the schedule, and hadn't even had the benefit of getting to test him while in his wakened state because the short-sighted technicians had only cared to collect their own data. Several more months of daily monitoring followed. The next entry after that was the day he remembered waking.

'Brian seems to have done a better job this time,' read Hatten's log. 'The subject is reported to show no signs of malfunction or discomfort. Preliminary observations show the heart to be working normally.'

' _This_ time', implying that it had been Brian who was responsible for waking Nick the previous time, the time that he didn't remember. He'd have thought Hatten had just gotten her data mixed up, but if there was one thing he could say for sure not just about her but about any of the scientists in this place, it was that they were fairly precise.

Had Brian really woken him once and found him to be uncooperative? Why? _How_? He had no memory of such an event.

He'd meant to stop for the night when he'd got to the end of Hatten's files, but now that his next step was before him Nick found he couldn't stop following the path. The head technician's logs were considerably harder to hack into. He checked the time: still early, hours yet 'til anyone was awake. Determined, he forged on. Before he could possibly consider sleep, there was another side to this story that he needed to see.

It took hours for him to gain entry into Brian's files, and an extra few minutes on top of that because he kept glancing back over his shoulder, worried someone would walk in on him. There was a little voice somewhere in his head telling him that this was paranoia, that Hatten's report hadn't meant what he thought it did, and that there was nothing strange going on here. He didn't listen to it; fleetingly, he wondered if the voice even belonged to him in the first place. It was unlike him to ignore the evidence, even (or especially) when the proposed outcome was frightening, and right now the evidence was pointing towards something happening behind the scenes. Regardless of what he read today, it definitely wasn't normal to wake up with writing on your arm.

There was the briefest sense of relief when Nick finally got into the technician's logs, but it was like how you might feel when a long-approaching storm finally hit. It didn't take but a minute to find what he was looking for: a long list of reports pertaining to _him_. Many of them were labeled with the dates he agreed to assist Brian with his cognitive testing; several were from long before. He selected the most recent, a log from only a few days ago.

Along with some notes written by one of the technician's aides, there was an audio recording. Nick should have been shocked to hear his own voice, but he wasn't; instead it just felt a bit like a dream.

“Today the boss wants us to discuss super mutants,” said a voice that was familiar, someone Nick had spoken to before but whose face and name he couldn't remember.

“Sure,” came Nick's response, in a tone and cadence that was just a little off from how he normally spoke. “Can't say I know all that much about 'em. They're not the friendliest guys.” He went on to describe a race of giant men, muscly with sickly green skin and a particular lack of interest in having conversations. He told the other speaker about the few run-ins he'd had with them, and estimated that maybe one out of a hundred hadn't tried to kill him on sight. He was surprisingly nonchalant about it.

Murderous mutant men sounded nightmarish, that was for sure, but hearing his own voice telling stories he'd never _imagined_ , let alone experienced, was what really scared Nick. At nearly three hours long, he didn't have the time to listen to the whole recording, so he skimmed through the rest of it. Most of it consisted of him talking about the Commonwealth, personal tales that were so detailed he doubted he could have made them up. (He wasn't lacking in imagination, but the casualness with which he told these outlandish stories lent them a credence that the fairytales he might come up with could never have.)

The other logs were mostly the same, his voice spinning tales of Commonwealth adventures for hours at a time, answering questions posed by the other speaker. He skimmed backwards through them, listening to the first and last minute or so, and several in between. After the most recent few it became obvious what he was hearing: the whimsical ramblings of a part of his self that only woke as he slept, a twin personality within him that had experienced the wide world in ways nobody else at the Institute had. That was what Brian did as he laid unconscious during their sessions: he grilled him for information he couldn't otherwise give.

But why? No, how? How was it that he couldn't recall these things, this past life? Was he in some sort of fugue state? Maybe he was only able to recall these memories under some kind of hypnosis.

He checked the time again, trying to reign in his frantic thoughts. It was getting late. He could imagine the sun's rays peeking over the horizon-- sunrise in a desolate landscape he could only imagine, though he'd apparently seen it before.

There wasn't a whole lot of time left, but still so much he had to know. He faced a decision: go back another step, or go back to the beginning. Which would be more enlightening?

He chose to check the oldest entry, and when he played the recording he was greeted first by rustling sounds, like several people rushing about moving stacks of papers, chairs scraping on the floor as people moved to take their seats, and a faint grunting some feet away from the recorder.

“What the hell are you planning on doing to me?” Nick's voice asked, frustrated and angry in a way he hadn't been or heard himself be since _before_. He grunted again. “Come on, you bastards. You've already got me where you want me. You may as well give me the evil monologue!”

Someone sighed, a sort of exaggerated weariness, and when they spoke it was Brian's voice. “You may think we're evil, but we just want what's best for humanity, and you may prove key to that. But we have to fix the damage that has been done while you were out in the wasteland.”

“I like how I am,” said Nick in the recording, his voice a little shaky. “The damage gives me character. Or haven't you heard?; Women love scars.”

(Nick laughed at himself, incredulous at his own apparent ability to make jokes at the most inopportune moments.)

There was a short pause, and then the technician said, “I'm afraid your _character_ won't be necessary anymore.” The foreboding statement was just dripping will ill-intent and it sent shivers all the way down Nick's spine and back up. The sentence was overlaid with more shuffling noises, hurried footsteps on the tile floor, and then a few short moments later Nick's voice again grunted harshly and gave a strangled cut-off cry of pain.

“Take him to a work station,” came Brian's voice, more professional and detached now that he didn't have Nick conscious to threaten. He gave commands to various techs who could be heard moving equipment around the room. “Get rid of all the skin. No, I'd say it's beyond repair. Toss it. We'll check his frame first, then his wiring. Leave the coolant system; Lacroix's letting Hatten work with that. Alright, cut it here.”

The recording ended, leaving Nick so speechless even coherent thoughts were having a hard time breaking through to the surface.

Far from answering all his questions, this made him even more confused. What had happened before this first recording? His voice was scared and hostile; he didn't know Brian any more than Nick had when he'd first been woken by him. He'd apparently come in from the Commonwealth, but clearly not by his own choosing. Had he not been made there after all? Was he maybe the doing of some other group, captured by the Institute to further their own goals?

Was anything they'd said to him actually true?

He didn't know; he didn't understand what any of this meant-- except for one very certain thing: these people could not be trusted. They'd lied to him; by omission and evasion, yes, but consistently enough for the weight of the sin to compound on itself infinitely. And it wasn't for his own good, or Shaun's own good. He'd known that for some time now. It was for their convenience, and their egos. Because there were truths out there that if Nick knew, he'd never have cooperated with them. Truths he was learning now, like how the horrors of the Commonwealth weren't all that survived above ground. That there were people, towns, life still forging ahead out there... a life he must have had.

He was dying for answers, and he was longing for freedom. At the moment, he could have neither. He checked the time: nearing 6am. His fingers hesitated over the keyboard. There were other entries in the technicians' files, tens of them, each probably bursting with information he didn't know he needed until now-- and that was to say nothing of the other secrets that hid in the long strings of symbols yet obscuring the more secure files belonging to the director.

Desperately, Nick wanted to continue on in his search, but the decision to stop was made for him when the maintenance manager's assistant entered the office with a yawn.

“Oh. Morning, Mr. Valentine. Doing some late-night repairs for us?”

He let her have the assumption, neither accepting nor denying it. “I'll be out of your way in a minute,” Nick said, tapping keys with inhuman speed to back out of the sensitive folders he'd hacked into. He left the computer back on its home screen and stood from the chair, glad not to be dizzy from sitting all night.

“It's no problem,” she said, as friendly and polite as any time he'd spoken to her. Still he couldn't help but wonder if even she and her lower-class coworkers were in on the deception. Did she know he wasn't 'born' here? Did she know he was being lied to every day? He didn't ask, just giving her a curt nod and stepping out into the hallway, where already several early risers went about their business, unaware of what Nick now knew, and the questions that were still eating at him.

Shaun wouldn't be up just yet, but he would wake soon. Nick made his way to the boy's quarters and let himself into the still and quiet little room. Morning light from the central courtyard filtered in through the blinds, leaving white stripes on the floor and wall. Shaun breathed steadily under a messy pile of blankets.

Nick's thoughts began to calm, ordering themselves more neatly in his head. What was he doing here? He'd rushed here, some vague idea about grabbing Shaun and escaping to their freedom, but did he have even the ghost of a plan? 'Get out now' wasn't feasible. He couldn't do it with his limited resources and knowledge.

Briefly, so very briefly, he considered waking Shaun and telling him of his findings, but he knew that was the wrong course of action. The boy would want to know, but he didn't _need_ to know. Not yet, at least. Not until Nick had a more coherent view of the truth and a better idea of how to handle it.

There were still quite a few files to read, quite a few secrets he might discover. If he was going to whisk them away to the Commonwealth, he needed them all. And he needed to be prepared. And that would take time. Not _too much_ time-- he felt it burning in him, that there wasn't much time left-- but he couldn't go just yet.

As much as he didn't like it, he'd have to wait.

Slowly, quietly, he stepped back out of the room, closing the door behind him as softly as he could. Shaun slept on.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _All men and women are born, live, suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, [...] and what we do to make them come about. We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents [...], or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live._   
>  _-Joseph Epstein_

There was a lot to do, and a lot he needed to know before he took action, but first things first; there was one piece of information that was inescapably vital: how the hell to get out of this place.

People did it all the time. Synths did, at least. Nick knew they came and went constantly, searching the wasteland for valuables or... well, he wasn't sure what exactly they went out for, but given what he'd learned recently he could definitely guess that they weren't going out to pick flowers.

Humans went too, he knew, or his new friend Kelly would be out of a job. He thought for a minute that maybe that was where he should start, but should he let anyone know he was even curious about such a thing? More than anything, right now, he didn't want to trip any alarms.

What he wished he could do was find another private console and continue his search for answers. Unable to do that, he returned to his room and paced a line in the floor. Pacing was unlike him; he tended to be pretty calm and collected. But it was also pretty unusual for him to find out his entire sense of self was built on lies, so maybe pacing was a reasonable reaction after all. At least it was a good repetitive motion for him to focus on while he tried to gather his thoughts.

He'd told Shaun that this was a case he was working on, but Nick wasn't really all that sure it fit the bill. A case was typically a mystery to be solved, and while there were definitely mysteries galore here, he already knew what the overall outcome was: this place was crooked, and they needed to leave. Now he just needed to prioritize, to figure out which details were really necessary to achieving that goal.

So they needed to physically exit the Institute. Once outside, they'd need some way to survive what was still just fantasy to Nick's mind-- radiation storms, super mutants, mole rats? He could only imagine what dangers those things actually posed. And then once they got out there and weren't dying, what then? If they didn't have some goal, wandering the wasteland wouldn't be much better than slowly suffocating down where they were; they'd just be trading one horror for another.

It was pretty obvious what would come next, the one thing Shaun couldn't seem to put from his mind: finding his parents.

Escape the Institute. Survive the elements. Find Shaun's parents. Simple enough, though unlikely to be _easy_.

He really wasn't prepared. He could just imagine them stumbling out into a hellish wasteland, every bit as bad as people had told them, and falling prey to its dangers before they could even get their bearings. He really couldn't let that happen.

He wished there was someone he could talk to about what to expect, but every person down here, every human and every synth-- there was just no way of knowing if he could trust them, or if they'd go running to Lacroix and tell her Nick was acting suspicious.

Except... there _was_ one person they could trust. Probably impossible to get a face-to-face with him, but the guy knew everything Nick needed to know before they embarked on their journey.

Reinstalling his other set of memories back into his brain was pretty strictly on the not-gonna-happen list. There was basically no chance he was going to be able to hack into wherever they stored the ...the files or whatever they were, and then find a nice terminal to jack himself into and upload the data without anyone noticing, even if he had the slightest clue how to do that in the first place. But if things kept going the way they had (and they generally did, unless interrupted), then some time in the next few days the technicians would put the memories back in _for_ him. He just had to wait. Then, later that night, Nick could hack back into the techs' files and listen to the recording of, hopefully, his other self answering all of Nick's unspoken questions.

The waiting was gonna be the hardest part.

He passed the time by trying to pretend he wasn't completely preoccupied. The workers he always helped out, they didn't seem to notice anything was off (or, more likely, they were tactful enough not to mention it). Shaun, on the other hand, knew something was up and was strongly of the opinion that Nick ought to be telling him about it.

“Is it the case?” he whispered across the table while he and Nick respectively _had_ lunch and _watched_ lunch. “You said you were gonna tell me when you found something out!”

“And I will,” Nick replied, giving Shaun a rather hard look. He didn't usually pull rank on the boy (he wasn't _really_ his father, after all), but this was one instance where he wasn't going to let the kid coerce him into telling him something before it was time. And Nick hadn't yet been approached by Brian about working with him again, so it wasn't nearly time.

Shaun pouted, which looked extra silly with a mouthful of reconstituted Salisbury steak. “You already know something, don't you?”

Nick scowled, wishing the kid would lay off at least until they weren't in such a public place. “That's for me to know, and you to find out. _Later,_ ” he said pointedly.

Later was never as good as now, but Shaun knew when to fold-- which was whenever Nick broke out his dad voice. (Not that Nick ever thought of it as such.) “Later tonight?” Shaun asked, hopeful.

“Later, when I have all the information.”

Sighing, Shaun said, “okay...”, overlaid with a slight whine. His expression still showed his excitement though, and Nick was relieved that the kid was not going to be too pushy or too upset about having to wait, because he really did want to tell him. It was just more important that neither of them let anything slip to anyone else, and of the two of them it was far more likely that Shaun accidentally let the secret out. Nick trusted him, definitely, but he was _eight_. (Or about eight, anyway. He still wasn't totally sure. Maybe ten.) 

They sat quietly, Shaun periodically glancing up at Nick as if he hoped maybe the synth would change his mind about not telling him yet. Nick felt sort of bad about it, because they never _didn't_ tell each other things, but he really couldn't talk about it, not here and now. Instead he asked Shaun a question that might get his mind off it, something he needed to know before he planned much farther.

“You still wish you could meet your parents?”

“Well yeah,” Shaun said, as if it was obvious (and it was, but still Nick had to ask).

“Even if you couldn't come back here?”

Shaun scoffed. “Why would I wanna be here if I could be with them?”

It was a rhetorical question; Shaun understood all the logical reasons why someone might want to stay at the Institute: food and clean water, comfort and safety from all the hazards that supposedly lived above. But that was the answer Nick had been expecting, and he grinned.

“So what would you do if you met your parents?”

It didn't take Shaun a moment at all to figure out the answer, even though it was a fairly heavy question. “I'd introduce them to you.”

The cheerful innocence in Shaun's voice caught Nick off guard and he gave a surprised little laugh as he looked away from the kid's very honest eyes. “You're a good kid,” he said, trying to suppress a smile that nevertheless reached up to his eyes.

Shaun grinned, always pleased to have a compliment from Nick. “I know,” he said, a sense of pride in his tone that matched how Nick felt about having sort of accidentally-on-purpose raised such a decent kid. (And he knew Shaun wasn't being conceited; he'd said it like that because he was proud of what Nick had done for him too.)

So that was one concern off his list: making sure that Shaun was still up for leaving. Whether for his own good or not, Nick just wasn't comfortable with the idea of kidnapping a kid that didn't want to be kidnapped. He guessed the next step was to find out... well, the world was a big place, so if they had to go scouring the land for signs of Shaun's parents, they were gonna have a bad time of it. He needed to find out where they were-- but again, it was sensitive info, so he'd probably have to wait until the evening to find it.

Back in his room, Nick went over his research goals for the night: location of Shaun's parents' vault; method for going above-ground; Commonwealth safety precautions. Then he took a nap, not because he was tired, even after several days without sleep, but because he knew both Shaun and Hatten would get on his case if they knew he wasn't resting. (Sleep helped lower his constantly-high body temperature, Hatten always tried to tell him. And Shaun, of course, wanted to make sure he was taking care of his heart, “since I went to _so_ much trouble to make it,” he would joke, not realizing how effective it actually was against Nick.)

When night began to fall (according to both internal and external clocks, and the automatically dimming lights in the courtyard), Nick awoke and went back over his goals again. How to escape; how to survive; how to find the vault. If he was lucky, he'd find all the answers in his search tonight, and other-Nick would confirm them when he next helped Brian. And if he _wasn't_ lucky, well, then he'd have to be smart.

The general store shop-keeper was just closing up when Nick came around and asked if she didn't mind him using her console for a little while.

“Go ahead,” she said with a wave. “I'm just a little surprised they haven't gotten you one of your own yet, since you're always fixing them for other people.”

Nick did his best not to seem impatient. He leaned casually against a counter top. “Yeah, I think even the techs forget I can't just do it in my head.”

The shop-keeper laughed at the thought. “Now wouldn't that be convenient!”

They chatted for a few minutes before the woman excused herself and Nick got to work. Although he had days' worth of surreal recordings of his own voice to skim through, he went after Kelly's files first. (Not her personal files, but the files of the requisition department. He doubted she was the only one who worked there.) With any luck, there'd be some clue about how all the people she outfitted for wasteland travel actually _got_ to the wasteland. Perhaps she gave them a key or a code or something for the presumably massive elevator that took them to the surface.

The majority of files were logs of people in and out-- not of the Institute, necessarily, but of the storage area. Most were synths with number designations he'd never bothered to try to remember (Nick didn't talk to them much, and to be honest he couldn't really tell them all apart), and the rest were human names he was maybe only vaguely familiar with. Someone left with this or that armor or weapon, and came back a few days later to either return the items or give a reason for why they didn't have them. Some unreturned items were labeled stolen or lost; some cited environmental damage. One gun was returned mangled with a claim that it had been chewed on by a deathclaw. (Nick was almost sure that last one was a joke.)

Nowhere in the files did he find any mention of a key or code or any other way to get out of the Institute, so he left that particular folder to search elsewhere.

It was a little bit hard to navigate when he didn't know what he was looking for. Neither Hatten's files nor Brian's files (that he'd seen) said anything about going above-ground, at least not in any useful amount of detail. But they were not the only head scientists who lived there, only the ones Nick knew personally. He'd never had a reason to speak much with whoever handled the other facets of the Institute's research; in fact, he was only vaguely aware that other facets even existed. But he remembered seeing and hearing a small amount of crossover between 'his' scientists and the ones with which he had no connection, so he searched back through familiar files he'd already read and compiled a list of other names whose personal or professional files he thought might yield results.

By the end of the evening's research, Nick had familiarized himself with most of the head scientists and technicians and the works they focused on, and he'd found the data he was looking for. As it turned out, there was no giant elevator to the surface-- or if there was, then nobody ever used it. It sounded like something out of a cheesy sci-fi novel, but apparently the main method of entering or exiting the Institute was teleportation.

He should have expected something like that, surrounded by mad scientists as he was. Of course they weren't going to use something as civilian as _stairs,_ and a vault door could never be enough to safeguard their experiments. That was probably half the reason they were so far under ground, not just the radiation. But sometimes he forgot that he was living proof that science-fiction had become science-fact in the hundred-odd-year gap between his memories and the current time. He forgot that this world wasn't bound by quite the same rules as the one he'd grown up in.

So, teleportation. Nick was glad he'd found the answer, but not exactly pleased that this was it. How on earth was he supposed to manage that? According to his readings, most of the synths came and went by activating a special chip implanted in them. Well, that was the gist of it anyway, though someone more in-the-know would probably describe it differently.

There was no way he was going to be able to get ahold of one of those chips, let alone install it in himself and figure out how to use the damned thing. But, apparently, it was possible for someone who already had a chip to take things with them when they went-- including people.

Nick had to stop for a minute and consider if what he was planning was really a viable option at all or if he'd just gotten so desperate he was grasping at straws.

Well it wasn't a perfect plan, but now that he had at least something to fill that particular void, he moved on to the next piece of the mystery he could solve: the whereabouts of Shaun's parents. This one was surprisingly easy to find, in a collection of miscellaneous Commonwealth information dumped into a sort of data repository that was accessible from almost any of the scientist's folders. It was a list of Vault-tec locations and their specialization, and though it didn't specifically mention that Shaun was from any of them, only one fit the bill: a vault which had aimed to put all of its residents into cryo-stasis.

Of course even he knew that most of the vaults had failed, but they'd at least started out well, or so he heard. And if there was going to be one vault which had a chance of still being in the same state as when they'd began, the one involving cryogenic freezing was, by definition, the most likely.

He memorized the approximate location of the vault (just north of Concord, on the edges of a neighborhood called Sanctuary Hills; perhaps an ironically good name for a place hosting a vault), and really hoped he wasn't barking up the wrong tree with this one, because he didn't like his chances of memorizing _all_ the vaults on this list, even just the ones in Massachusetts proper.

Two problems more-or-less solved, Nick returned to listening through the recordings of his other-self talking to Brian's techs and settled in for an all-nighter. It was less illuminating than the night before, for which he was definitely glad because he didn't think he could handle another giant revelation. Still, he returned to his room a little before dawn feeling much better educated and decidedly less frantic.

When breakfast time came, he was surprised to see Shaun come to gather him instead of the other way around. The boy normally required a little coaxing to get out of bed in a timely fashion (not that he was ever late; he just pushed the boundaries of his schedule), but here he was, bright and early, looking at Nick as if he were the one risking truancy.

“Good morning, Nick,” he said brightly, not sleepy or bleary-eyed.

Nick raised an eyebrow at him. “Huh. Mornin' to you too.”

“Wanna go to breakfast?” Shaun asked, rocking back and forth slightly on his feet.

“Lead the way,” Nick said, gesturing in that general direction and trying not to look suspicious of the kid's motives.

Shaun did have a reason for waking early, but it was nothing unexpected. He sat and stared hopefully at Nick over his bowl of cereal, and Nick laughed awkwardly, his eyebrows drawn together. “Kid, I told you I'd fill you in as soon as I could.”

“Why not now?” Shaun asked, exuding innocent curiosity.

“Because I don't want anyone getting in trouble.”

Shaun pouted, looking vaguely offended. “I'm not gonna get in trouble,” he said. “I'm not gonna _tell_ anyone!” Nick was about to shake his head and offer more of the same excuses, but Shaun didn't really give him time. He said, “Besides, I already figured it out.”

Nick pitched his voice real low. “Yeah? And what's that?” he asked, sounding just dangerous enough to make it clear that this was a serious situation.

Nodding and lowering his voice as well, Shaun said conspiratorially, “You're going to the surface. That's why you went down to see that girl the other day, and why you've been staying up late, and why you're getting Brian to tell you about the above-ground. You wouldn't really care if you weren't gonna go.”

He wasn't sure if he should be surprised or not, because he'd been doing a fair job (he thought) of being discreet about this all, but Shaun was a smart kid, and he paid attention to what was going on around him, especially whatever Nick was doing. Nick took a breath and sat up out of the secretive hunch he'd been in, and his expression melted into a sort of unavoidable fondness. “That's quite some detective work,” he said. “Guess you take after the old man after all.”

Shaun beamed, though an excited and worried look came over him after just a moment. “You're gonna take me, right?” he asked, a little too loud. He grinned sheepishly and adjusted his voice to hardly more than a whisper. “Right?”

“Would you wanna go?”

“I already _told_ you I wanna go!” Shaun said, fondly exasperated. “So when are we going?”

Nick shook his head. “ _If_ we were gonna go, it wouldn't be just yet. I've got another job to do with Brian, and a few more things to figure out.”

“So, next week?” Shaun asked, suppressing a grin when Nick looked at him hard. “ _If_ we were gonna go, it might be like... next week?”

Although Nick liked that Shaun was enthusiastic about the idea, he wished he could impress upon the kid just how big of a deal this was, and that going through with it would be truly life-changing. (And if they weren't careful, life- _ending_.) “Look,” he said, the word falling out of his mouth like a sigh. “I've still got some research to do before making any big decisions, so I'm gonna need you to pretend we never had this conversation.”

Shaun gave a quiet whine, and Nick adopted his most sincere dad-cop look.

“Shaun, I'm serious. If anybody finds out we're even _thinking_ about leaving, we're gonna be in bigger trouble than you can imagine. ...And I know your imagination's pretty good.”

Wide-eyed, Shaun bit his lip and nodded, so Nick continued.

“Just act normal. I promise I won't leave you behind, so just be patient, alright?”

“Alright,” Shaun answered, and Nick could imagine him second-guessing the whole thing, though he realized it was probably only his slightly-guilty conscience making him think that; Shaun was resolute about his desire to meet his parents in a way that it was difficult to be as an adult. Nick appreciated that. He promised he'd try to get things together quickly.

It ended up being a little quicker than he imagined.

Brian didn't end up contacting him to work again that day, which left Nick a little irritated as night fell and he found another console to read at. He felt like his heart had been replaced by a ticking time-bomb some time over the past few days, each pulse bringing him closer to a fate he was fairly certain would be unpleasant, the anxiety just making the time tick faster.

Hearing his voice in the recordings he played from the technicians' files was strangely centering. He concentrated on internalizing everything that other Nick Valentine said about the Commonwealth, studying his tales with decidedly more focus than he remembered applying to his history lectures at school all those years ago (and history was one of his better classes). It was a lot to take in, and he hoped that he'd be able to recall the information if or when it became relevant-- though he hoped much of it he'd never need.

Some hours into his study, an entry two or three months back caught his attention, when his other self asked after Shaun's parents. Brian confirmed what Nick had already figured out: that the boy had been taken from a vault specializing in cryogenic stasis. He was a little surprised to hear Brian's assumption that the kid's parents were probably still frozen, but what really piqued his interest was the mention of someone named Kellogg. A few metaphorical light bulbs lit up in Nick's head. 'Kello' was Kellogg; Kellogg was the one in charge of bringing Shaun to the Institute; Shaun's parents were still (probably) frozen, ergo they had no idea that their son was taken from them; the Institute were officially kidnappers. It wasn't remotely surprising by this point, and it didn't change Nick's opinion much, but it was still good to know.

There was still the mystery of who Kellogg was (a human? A synth? Nick had never met anyone by that name here, as far as he knew), and if they had any more details or relevance to Shaun's situation, but Brian spoke no more about the person and, curiosity somewhat satisfied, Nick returned to his study of the other elements of the Commonwealth. 

He was partway through a report about edible plants and the likelihood of coming across processed pre-war foods that were still good (though not _too_ good, he imagined), when he heard a clicking noise from the hall-- footsteps. Tensing, he looked up and waited for them to pass, because nobody was _really_ supposed to be out and about at this time of night, and that included him. But the footsteps didn’t continue down the hall; they paused briefly as the person apparently turned the corner into the room. Nick hastily backed out of his research, even though it was nothing incriminating. He stood, instincts biting at the back of his mind. A moment later, a woman came into view, a pistol in her hand.  
  
She didn’t wait a moment before she fired at him.  
  
The pistol was silenced, but the bullet still pinged loudly off the wall behind him as Nick dove for cover behind the desk. There was never much time to think in a shoot-out, but the shock of being shot at for the first time in years made everything seem to slow down, and he had the chance to wonder who the hell this woman was. He’d only got a glimpse of her before she’d tried to end his life, but she hadn’t looked familiar. Furthermore, she’d been dressed in black, which was extremely unusual down there; he couldn’t help thinking of it as an omen (and possibly a purposeful one, if she was dressed to kill). It was possible that she was one of the Institute’s enemies, come to destroy the place, but his paranoia had ratcheted up to levels high enough lately that he would bet his right hand she was there for him and him alone.  
  
Or maybe not him _alone._ If they’d got wind of what he was doing, Shaun might be in danger too. 

The thought of him spurred Nick into action. He had to protect Shaun, and the only way to do that was to survive, and escape. He couldn't cower there and let this woman take him down for her mysterious masters, whoever wanted him dead. (And he was pretty sure he knew who they were, but he couldn't dwell on that right then.) So when the woman paused a moment in her firing to come into the room and find a better vantage point for doing him in, Nick allowed his old instincts to kick back in and rolled out to meet her, tackling her to the ground and wrestling the gun out of her hand. He tried, at least; he was a bit rusty (metaphorically) so there was a struggle for a few too-long moments that Nick wasn't sure he was going to win. The thought sparked in him that he might actually die there, and Shaun with him, and though he was pretty sure he didn't make adrenaline anymore he could almost feel it coursing through him at the idea, and it egged him on until he had the upper hand. 

Straddling the black-clad woman with the gun pressed hard under her chin, he growled, "who sent you?!" It seemed the only thing to ask.  
  
He’d sort of expected her to smirk, the way assassins in TV shows did when they were so sure of themselves, but she didn’t appear to have much opinion about the situation. She was neither smug, nor bothered, aside from presumed annoyance over being immobilized. Her expression didn’t change as she told him, “You have been deemed unnecessary. Submit to your destruction, for the good of the Institute.”  
  
Nick didn’t have but a moment to be galled by this place’s absolute hubris; likewise, there wasn’t time to notice how monotonomic the woman’s voice was. She gathered her energy and pushed at Nick to shrug him off of her. But the gun was still jammed into her neck, and the sudden movement jostled his finger on the trigger, the bullet tearing a hole straight through her neck.  
  
Shocked, Nick winced back, but the expected spray of blood didn’t coat him; inside the woman’s neck was not organic viscera, but synthetic cabling, slick with coolant from a cracked tube. She struggled against him, but her head lolled back slightly, some of the cables snapped, and it was easily one of the eeriest things Nick had seen in memory.  
  
So they’d finally done it, made human-like synths. _Pretty_ human-like, anyway. At a glance, she was indistinguishable from a human, nothing like the uncanny valley of the white-skinned synth servants they were all so familiar with, visible seams and glowing eyes beacons to their robotic nature, even when they didn’t open their mouths. 

Even though he'd been good at his job, back in the pre-war times, Nick had never liked hurting people. That was why he'd graduated as quickly as possible from beat cop: being a detective was certainly risky but generally included less common violence and more puzzle solving. But of course he'd still had to shoot people from time to time, had had to kill before. He would not have hesitated to kill a person who was threatening him (and by extension Shaun), but to know that this woman wasn't strictly human made it a lot easier to do what needed doing-- even if some part of him wondered at the morality of it, given what he was these days. He didn't think on it much; if he was lucky (and quick) he might have time to ruminate on it later. 

Vigor renewed after a full second or two of deliberation, he slammed her back to the ground and wedged the gun back where it was, right into the tear in her throat. She looked at him dispassionately and he couldn’t help but find her contemptible.  
  
“How do I get out of here?” he demanded. She said nothing, only giving him a hard look that was too reminiscent of the way Brian looked at him when he wasn’t looking, and he wondered if her vocal chords had been severed in the misfire. “Do you value your life? Tell me how to get out of this place and I’ll let you go with maybe only one broken leg.”  
  
The noise that escaped her was best likened to a scoff, but nowhere near so emotional. “My orders are to eliminate Nick Valentine,” she said, struggling against him even though the muzzle of the gun was so far into her throat it had to be scraping her spine.  
  
Nick knew he could feel pain, though he’d been lucky enough not to have to feel too much of it. There was no way this woman didn’t hurt, unless the scientists had further flaunted their abilities and removed that very human aspect. Either way, Nick found it unsettling that she was hardly reacting to what would have been debilitating to anyone else, even him. And even though she was just a synth (‘just’), he didn’t want to have to wrench her arm out of its socket as she fought him, or further tear at the steadily seeping hole in her neck.  
  
“Would you just _lay off?!”_ he grunted, struggling to keep her from twisting her legs around him and leveraging herself on top. “We don’t have to do this!”  
  
But she wasn’t interested in discussion, and she didn’t care that he’d dislocated at least one limb and broken most of her neck. She fought him like a savage animal, but with none of the real visceral desperation, grabbing, tearing, shaking, even as her expression remained almost flat. The gen 1 servants exhibited more emotion. Was following their orders so important that it left no room for any other thoughts or feeling?  
  
The entire struggle couldn’t have been more than two minutes, but it was enough to work him into quite a state, and when Nick finally had no other choice and shot her through the head, it left his heart heaving. He was sure there was no physical way he could be panicking, but that was what it felt like, staring down at the synth woman's body as it fell to stillness under him, unsure if shooting her in the head would be enough; unsure if it was too much. He'd killed her. Had he killed her? Would the scientists be able to bring her back? Had she even really been alive? 

Now was not the time for existential crises, not if he wanted to continue having them, so he stood and willedilled his heart to calm. He backed away from the woman and her open-eyed blank expression, trying not to look at her but unable to tear his eyes away until he’d turned the corner out into the hall.  
  
The gunshots had been silenced, but their scuffle was not quiet for that time of morning. People would come to check on the noise before too long, so he hurried to Shaun’s room, looking carefully left and right at every new hallway, and over his shoulder so much he knew it would be suspicious if anyone did happen to see him. He kept the gun out, ready but tucked against his side in a feeble attempt at concealment.  
  
Shaun was still asleep when he slipped quietly into his room, but Nick wasted no time in shaking him away, as gently but urgently as he could. Luckily, the boy was quick to rouse; maybe he had a sense for danger much like Nick did, or maybe he was on alert from Nick’s insinuation that something would soon be happening.  
  
“What’s wrong?” he asked, eyes wide but still yawning. “Are we leaving?”  
  
“Yup,” Nick said, nodding and pulling the covers back, tugging at Shaun’s sleeve end. “And we’re gonna have to be quick and quiet about it.”  
  
Shaun nodded in understanding, but his gaze drifted to Nick’s right hand and the gun he clutched tightly. He was by no means a stupid kid; even having lived a sheltered life, he knew what guns were for and he knew that Nick had used them before. He lingered on it, but only for a moment before he was up and shoving his feet into his shoes. There wasn’t time for them to grab anything to take with them, and Shaun seemed to understand that without it being said, so they were hurrying out into the hallway almost immediately, Nick gripping the boy’s hand almost as tight as the gun. He couldn’t afford to lose either one right then; they were his meaning and means for getting out of the place.  
  
Being still a little before dawn, they passed only a few people on their way, and they hung back in doorways and shadows to let them all pass. Nick wanted to believe that most of the common folk there weren’t in on the scheme, but he had no way of knowing, and it was possible that anyone or everyone was looking for him under quiet alarm. He still had the silenced pistol, but he didn’t dare use it unless it was an emergency. Even if the janitors and cooks and shopkeepers _were_ in on it, most of them had never done him any foul deed.  
  
Heart pounding on whatever he had for a ribcage, Nick led them stealthily through the halls, down into a quiet corner he’d only made himself familiar with recently. He was still largely at a loss, but he had one idea for how to proceed, and he prayed they could pull it off without shedding any more blood or coolant.  
  
Kelly was sitting back in her chair when they entered Requisitions, reading a book and looking only half-awake. She did a sleepy double-take when she noticed Nick come in, smiling when she realized who it was. The friendly look quickly faded though, as she took in the situation: the odd time of day; the child clinging to him; the hard expression on his face. The gun in his hand. He shifted his grip on it. 

"Kelly," he said, as cordial as he could be, given the situation. He was sure it came across strained and cold. "We need to go topside." 

She swallowed and sat up slowly. "You're… not cleared to leave…" Her eyes flicked between Nick's face, his stolen pistol, and Shaun. It should have been clear that Shaun was there of his own accord by how close he was standing to Nick, but it looked like Kelly was still wondering if he was being abducted. Or maybe she just knew that neither of them was supposed to be leaving.  
  
"Oh I think we've got all the clearance we need," Nick said, gesturing slightly with the gun, just enough to know she saw it. He sighed, as much as he was able, as much as he had the time for. "Please. I don't wanna have to hurt anyone, but we're getting out of this place one way or another."

She only hesitated for a few moments (long, long moments, it felt like) before Nick took a measured step forward and raised his gun to half-mast. He tried not to waver, not to look down at Shaun, who he could feel was stiff with worry. God, he didn't want to kill someone in front of the kid, but if it was between them or one of their captors (or their captors' co-conspirators), he knew which one he'd always choose. Kelly was a nice enough lady, but he wasn't here for her, and she wasn't going to keep them from their freedom. 

Finally she stepped out from behind the counter, her hands held carefully in front of her so they could see she wasn't armed. "Alright," she said appeasingly, as she turned and unlocked the gate behind her with telegraphed movements. "You won't make it far though." 

Nick followed her glance up at the little red lightbulb on the wall. Normally it was still, just one of the rare ornaments to be found decorating the Institute's otherwise barren walls, but now it was blinking rapidly, ominous in the way it was so quiet despite its incessant flashing. 

"That's the alarm," Shaun muttered at his elbow. "It went off when there was a fire once. It's quiet so it doesn't scare everyone." 

But those in the know would know how to respond, Nick surmised. 

Kelly went behind the gate for a short moment, and Nick trained the gun on her in case she got the idea to snag one of those over-powered rifles, but she came back almost immediately with a little handheld device like a small radio mated with a telephone receiver. She fiddled with some of the knobs and buttons on it and then handed it over to Nick with a guarded expression, clearly less than enthused about helping them.  
  
“Hold on to whatever you’re taking with you,” she said, glancing at Shaun as if she was trying to figure out why he was there. “Then press this button.”  
  
Nick didn’t wait a moment. He wrapped an arm tight around Shaun and depressed the button, clenching his jaw in lieu of holding breath.  
  
It was a disorienting experience; the white walls and blinking red light filtered out, as if he were losing consciousness, but without the tunnel vision. Then a new scene filtered in: the ruins of a large stone building, brick and concrete crumbled all around them in piles. He was glad he was mostly mechanical; a glance down at Shaun showed the boy was dizzy and nauseous. He leaned heavily against Nick as he breathed deeply, hands clutched in Nick's shirt. When he got a hold of himself enough to look up, his eyes were wide with fear. 

"It's huge…" he whispered, his voice so small in the vast expanse of the world that it was easily lost. 

It _was._ It seemed bigger than Nick remembered it, the dark sky stretching on endlessly. But the barrenness of it was what struck him. Brian and the others-- they'd been telling the truth about that, at least. 

Though they stared up at the sky for what felt almost like hours, it was barely ten seconds from when Shaun loosened his grip on Nick that the forms of two Institute guards materialized nearby. 

"Shit," Nick muttered, upset at himself for not getting his bearings in the spare few moments they'd been allotted. He dove for cover behind the nearest piece of crumbled wall big enough to conceal him, shoving Shaun down. The boy gave an indignant cry but stayed down, huddling against the concrete as Nick dropped the transmitter device and cocked the silenced pistol. But the two men had already seen them and were firing before Nick could get a shot in. 

"Are they gonna kill us?" Shaun asked worriedly, voice cracking. 

"Not a chance," Nick told him, "but keep your head down." 

Between the three of them, Nick figured that they both had more practice than him-- at least in recent history. But he had the advantage of being desperate; he couldn't imagine that either of them could possibly really care about the outcome of this situation nearly as much as he did. 

On top of that, he was pretty sure they were humans, which gave him another advantage. Every part of them would bleed.  
  
The plan he came up with upon realizing this, well, it wasn’t exactly a _good_ plan. It put him at quite a lot of risk, and consequently risked Shaun because if Nick died there was no telling what would happen to the kid. But Nick knew enough about his own anatomy to know that just sticking his head up over the wall to shoot at their pursuers would be exposing only the most delicate part of him. Because just like a human, he would likely die if shot in the head or chest. He’d seen that earlier, with the unfortunate synth woman who would be haunting his dreams for who knows how long. But unlike his pursuers, he could be shot almost anywhere else with little risk of serious damage. Coolant tubes ran through his core, but they didn’t taper off into tiny capillaries like human blood vessels did; their bullets would have to strike an artery to cause any damage that was more than superficial.  
  
It was still second nature to try to avoid harm, self-preservation hard coded into his mind so well that it transcended humanity. So it was no easy task to convince himself to throw caution to the wind and run out from behind cover, rushing the guards. His heart pounded as he ran towards them, hoping that having a larger target would disperse their shots, hoping that having a _moving_ target would keep them from hitting him at all.  
  
None of it mattered, he reminded himself. If they shot him, it might not hit anything serious. If it _did,_ he might not die. Even if the wounds were mortal, if he could help Shaun find his parents before he kicked the ol’ metal bucket, it would be worth it. It would be _something,_ at least.  
  
He was sure he was rushing to his death, but he didn’t mind. Anything to help Shaun; anything to get away from that place. He couldn’t stand the lies anymore.  
  
He’d told the kid to keep his head down, and he’d relied on Shaun’s fear to make him obey, but he couldn’t be too mad that he didn’t listen because the shout of “Nick!” and Shaun suddenly popping up from behind cover were probably what kept him from serious harm. The momentary distraction was enough for Nick to get the upper hand on the guards, who must’ve not known quite what to do when fighting a child and a crazed synth.  
  
To Nick, the next few moments were something of a blur. He hoped they were just as much of a blur to Shaun, because while he was ready to do what he needed to to protect them, Nick didn’t want the kid to remember the gory details of his father-figure murdering two men in the name of their freedom. He could tell it was going to be a brutal world out there, but if he could avoid it, if he could do anything to avoid exposing Shaun to more death than was strictly necessary, he would. He hoped that Shaun had looked away as Nick loosed the last few bullets into his opponents, taking one down with a lucky headshot, and hitting the other in the shoulder and chest before closing the rest of the distance and knocking him out with the butt of his gun. He stood over the two bodies, sucking in harsh breaths in an attempt to cool and calm his rapidly beating heart, and he didn’t look back over his shoulder towards the kid until he could be sure his expression was at least neutral.  
  
Shaun looked close to tears, but he seemed to be holding up. He was clinging to the wall they’d hidden behind, waiting for some signal. He must have saw it in Nick’s face; slowly, he stumbled out from behind the wall and approached Nick. Nick didn’t let him get too close to the bodies, instead meeting him halfway and wrapping his arms around the kid. Shaun sighed heavily into his chest, like a single dry sob, and they stood there for a moment.  
  
“We’ve gotta get a move on,” Nick said, after they’d had a few seconds to compose themselves. He didn’t explain that there would probably be more guards on their tail, and he didn’t explain that he was sorry he’d had to kill them but not enough to keep from doing it again. He didn’t tell Shaun that there was a rough journey ahead of them. Shaun knew, well enough.  
  
Although he didn’t want to look at them again, and risk having their faces burned into his memory, Nick bent down and pulled the rifle out of one man’s stiffening grip. The silenced pistol was spent, and he had the feeling they’d be needing something with a little more stopping power, especially if they were going to be on the run for the foreseeable future.  
  
The decision made him a little uneasy, but Nick turned to Shaun and handed him the pistol. “Hold on to this,” he instructed, positioning it carefully in Shaun’s small hands. “It’s not loaded, but treat it like it is. You remember what we talked about, right?”  
  
Uncertain but awed, Shaun looked down at the gun he now held, then back up at Nick with a hesitant nod. “Don’t point at anything you don’t wanna kill,” he repeated, from a lesson Nick had taught him when he’d first started thinking this might be a possibility.  
  
“That’s right,” Nick said. He knew there was so much more to say, not just on the topic of gun safety but in general, but now was not the time for it. Now they had to get as far away from here as possible.  
  
One last glance at their assailants made Nick notice the transceiver they’d brought with them. He didn’t know how it worked, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it had a tracking device in it. As expensive and potentially useful as it looked, he couldn’t let anyone figure out where they were. He stooped down to pick the thing up and then smashed it hard against a piece of rubble, hoping that might stop them from coming after him. Maybe it would stop the Institute people from coming to the surface at all. After what he’d learned from listening to his recordings, he thought it best that they just stay down there.  
  
“Why?” Shaun asked, wide-eyed, probably fighting against the rules that had been branded into him by the techs, to always respect technology.  
  
“Just a precaution,” Nick said shortly. When he was sure it was damaged beyond repair, he went back to their hiding place behind the dilapidated wall and retrieved the other, but Shaun stopped him with a cautious hand on his arm.  
  
“Let’s just hide it somewhere. In case we need it again later.”  
  
Nick raised an eyebrow at him. “You think you’re gonna wanna go back? I really can’t recommend it, after we left in such a hurry.”  
  
“No,” Shaun said emphatically, with that decisiveness that was so innate to children. “But, just in case.”  
  
Admittedly, Nick knew he hadn’t needed to destroy the thing. They weren’t staying in the area anyway, and as long as they didn’t take the transceiver with them then the Institute’s guards or Seekers wouldn’t be able to use it to find them. And although Nick was certain he’d rather die than go back down in that hole, he could see the logic of not burning the bridge.  
  
Shaking his head, Nick said, “Alright kid, you’re right. We’ll drop it in someone’s mailbox or something. Just in case.”  
  
So even though it practically burned him, he carried it in the hand not holding the gun, figuring they might use it to throw the Institute off their tail anyway. They’d just take a slight detour, make it look like they were heading towards Quincy instead of Concord.  
  
He was wondering how to get his bearings and figure out where they were or which way was even north, when Shaun gasped and tugged insistently on his shirt in a way he hadn’t since he was much smaller. “Nick, look!” He pointed out at the horizon, and even though he’d seen it hundreds of times in his distant past, the first vestiges of sunrise made Nick’s heart skip a beat. Thin fingers of pink and purple reached up into the softening blue of night, heralding a light he’d almost thought he might never see again.  
  
“It’s so pretty…” Shaun said, staring at the colors as they sharpened and grew deeper. “Is that… the sun?”  
  
Nick smiled, feeling a sense of peace wash over him despite the danger he knew they faced, and the blood on his hands. “It sure is.”  
  
He still didn’t know quite where they were, or how to get where they were going, but at least now he knew which way was east. (No amount of apocalypse could change that, he was certain.) And he knew which way they had to go, because there was no way Shaun was taking his eyes off the sight before him-- and that was to say nothing of how Nick felt himself, which was quite the same. Even if it took them in the complete opposite direction, they owed it to themselves to see in the new day as its warmth washed over them.  
  
“Well, let’s get a move on,” Nick said, nudging Shaun forward and thinking that if at least the sun still rose every morning like this, there was hope.

**Author's Note:**

> And that's the end of "Act 1"! I'm taking a break for a month or so to finish the next part. Should be back come August, I think. 
> 
> Please let me know if you have any thoughts or feelings! =] And, genuinely, thanks so much for reading!


End file.
